Blotto without Twinks was rather like a referee’s whistle without a pea in it. Though he had everything the younger son of a Duke could wish for at his home, Tawcester Towers – hunting on his magnificent charger Mephistopheles, trips out in his Lagonda to knock vicars off bicycles in the narrow lanes of Tawcestershire – he still missed his sister.
From childhood, except when Blotto was away at Eton, the siblings had rarely been apart for any length of time. Their solidarity had been useful in dealing with the idiocies of Loofah, their older brother and current Duke of Tawcester. More importantly, a united front had helped them stand up against the ferocious will of their mother, the Dowager Duchess, to whom the most forbidding North Face of any mountain in the world would lose out in the Implacability Stakes.
A rueful Blotto remembered in precise detail when his sister had first broached the subject of their forthcoming separation. After a successful day in the hunting field, which had destroyed many yards of the local farmers’ fences and caused a serious diminution in the Tawcester-shire fox population, Blotto was drinking cocoa in the white lace and silk fluffiness of Twinks’s boudoir when she made her announcement.
‘Blotto me old carriage crankshaft, you know I have recently rather pitched the crud into the custard so far as the Mater’s concerned … ?’
‘No,’ he said. Except in matters concerning cricket or hunting, Blotto could be unobservant about what was going on around him. He was blithely unaware of atmospheres between people. He certainly hadn’t noticed that the ‘froideur’ between his sister and mother was any ‘froider’ than usual.
‘Well, not to fiddle round the fir trees, brother of mine, the Mater was very keen to get me to twiddle the old marital reef-knot with the Earl of Minchinhampton …’
‘Who?’
‘Niffy Nottsborough.’
‘Ah. On the same page now.’ The nickname clarified things. Blotto had actually been at Eton with the aforementioned Niffy Nottsborough.
‘The Mater was particularly on the mustard because the Earl of Minchinhampton is the son of the Duke of Thetford and, when the old gargoyle takes a one-way ticket to the Pearlies, Niffy will inherit the title.’
‘Will he, by Denzil!’
‘Of course he will, Blotters. As you’ve known since you were in nursery-naps, that’s how primogeniture works.’
‘Tickey-tockey,’ said Blotto with some uncertainty. He never felt entirely comfortable around long words, and he knew that those with ‘genit’ in them could be rather rude.
‘Anyway, the Mater’s gone into a right stick-in-a-wasp’s-nest about my refusing to ding the church bells with Niffy.’
‘Toad-in-the-hole!’ said Blotto. But he wasn’t really surprised. The Dowager Duchess’s reactions to having her will thwarted made the eruption of Krakatoa look like a minor movement in a molehill. ‘So, if I may pose the questionette, sister of mine … why did you turn the poor pineapple down?’
‘Niffy? I turned him down because he has the looks of a frog keen to return to tadpole status … because the material between his ears is pure unadulterated kapok … because his conversation rarely aspires to the level of the averagely gifted two-year-old … and, worst of all, because he once had the brazen gall to say to me “Don’t you worry your pretty little head about that” …’
‘All black marks in the copybook, Twinks, I can see that.’
‘And also,’ she concluded witheringly, ‘when a boddo gets the nickname “Niffy”, it’s usually for a reason.’
‘You’re bong on the nose there. At Eton his study was known as “The Pong Room at Lord’s”. And in chapel, Niffy always had to sit in his own pew.’
‘Anyway, Blotters, to escape the phosphorescent fury of the Mater’s wrath, I was thinking of pongling away from Tawcester Towers for a breakette.’
‘Visiting one of your debby chumbos in the Metrop, eh?’
‘No, Blotters, further afield than that.’
‘Then where, in the name of strawberries?’ asked Blotto, for whom stirring anywhere off the Tawcester Towers estate was an act of impetuous folly.
‘Mexico,’ came the cool reply.
‘Mexico! But that’s … that’s …’ Geography not being one of his strengths, he concluded lamely, ‘… a long way away. And it’s abroad! Why would anyone with half a braincell want to go abroad?’
‘To escape the wrath of the Mater?’
‘Ah, yes. You’ve pinged a partridge there. But surely that’s not the whole clangdumble?’
So, Twinks had explained in more detail the reason for her travels. One of the few people she knew at her own intellectual level was a certain Professor Erasmus Holofernes. He lived and worked at the all-male postgraduate Oxford college, St Raphael’s. And one of his fellow academics, Professor Hector Troon-Wheatley, an expert on the civilisation of the Aztecs, had recently gone out to Mexico to examine an exciting new archaeological find there, in a site called the Attatotalloss Caves. Twinks, who had had a lifelong fascination with all things Aztec and who knew as much on the subject as most experts, would be the perfect assistant for Troon-Wheatley on the trip.
Another attraction for her was the opportunity to visit a friend, Begonia Guiteras, whom Twinks had met while the Mexican was doing the London season as a means of learning English. The two beautiful and independent young women had hit it off. They longed to spend more time together. And, serendipitously, it turned out that Begonia lived in the province of Jalapeno, virtually on the doorstep of the Aztec dig.
Her father, General Henriquez Guiteras, had extensive estates in the area and was deeply involved in local politics. Staying with the family, Twinks would be able to mix her archaeological business with the pleasure of Begonia’s company.
It was the perfect way of escaping the fulminating recriminations of the Dowager Duchess. Twinks was ecstatic about the prospect.
Blotto less so.
A surprising effect of his loneliness was that, in his sister’s absence, Blotto spent more time in London. Though the Tawcester Towers estates contained everything he could ever wish for in terms of activities, it wasn’t so well stocked for company. He rarely saw his brother or mother. Loofah lived in a separate wing, corralled by his wife Sloggo and miscellaneous daughters. And avoiding the Dowager Duchess in her domain of the Blue Morning Room was, for Blotto, a daily preoccupation.
His only kindred spirit on the premises was the chauffeur Corky Froggett, but he found that even the pleasures of discussing the Lagonda’s fine engineering were finite.
At least in London, a bereft Blotto could spend time at his club, The Grenadier (known to all its members as ‘The Gren’). There, in the company of various old muffin-toasters from Eton, he could get mournfully wobbulated.
So low was his general mood that sometimes he didn’t drive the Lagonda to London himself but let Corky Froggett do it. The barometer of Blotto’s feelings had moved that far from its default setting of ‘Sunny’. He had even been heard on occasion to utter that expression bordering on despair, ‘Broken biscuits!’
He was in The Gren late one morning, working his way morosely down a bottle of the Club Claret when he was greeted by a hearty, ‘Blotto, me old soup-strainer! How’re your doodles dangling?’
The speaker turned out to be Willy ‘Ruffo’ Walberswick, a fellow Old Etonian, who had subsequently rather downgraded himself from the aristocracy by becoming a journalist.
Having assured the new arrival (possibly inaccurately) that his doodles were dangling in parade-ground order, Blotto offered Ruffo a drink.
‘You’re a gent, me old duffel coat. I’ll have a brandy and s – light on the s, though. Need a good few bracers over the next twenty-four hours before I pongle down to Southampton. Boat to catch tomorrow night. Off to the latest international incident.’
‘So, Ruffo, to dot the tees and cross the eyes, what do you mean by an “international incident”?’
‘I mean the next powder keg on a very short fuse, set shortly to spoffing well detonate with an impact that’ll coffinate thousands.’
‘Oh, and where is this particular powder keg when it’s got its spats on?’ asked Blotto without much interest. International incidents were low on his scale of priorities, only marginally above ladies’ fashions and royal romance. Assassinations and revolutions would never attain the allure of hunting or cricket.
But he became more concerned when Ruffo replied, ‘Mexico.’
‘Mexico? What’s put lumps in the custard there?’
‘Could be another revolution,’ said Ruffo. ‘Boss of one of the provinces has declared it an independent republic, with himself as its tin-pot dictator!’
‘Which province?’ asked Blotto, though he only knew the name of one.
And sure enough, that was the answer Ruffo gave: ‘Jalapeno.’
‘So, what’s the name of this tin-pot dictator?’
He kind of knew what the answer would be.
‘General Henriquez Guiteras,’ Ruffo announced.
‘Of course, I will do whatever it is Your Lordship requires of me,’ said Corky Froggett. ‘And if the duty necessitated my laying down my life in your defence, I would regard that as a generous bonus.’
‘Toad-in-the-hole, Corky! You always were a Grade A foundation stone!’
‘Thank you, milord,’ said the humbly gratified chauffeur. ‘You said the excursion would involve “abroad”. If I may ask … which country where the natives have grown up without the advantage of being British are we due to visit this time?’
‘Mexico,’ the young master replied. Now that he knew his sister was staying in a country that was the next ‘powder keg on a very short fuse, set shortly to spoffing well detonate with an impact that’ll coffinate thousands’, he thought he should pongle off and check on the well-being of the young shrimplet.
Corky Froggett was unfazed by the news of their destination. ‘And do you know much about that country, milord?’
‘A boddo like me doesn’t need to know much about a country, Corky. Foreign countries are all as alike as two peas in a whistle. They’re “abroad” and that’s all there is to it. The only thing you need to know about an abroad country is whether they play cricket or not.’
‘And do the Mexicans play cricket, milord?’
‘I haven’t got a tinker’s inkling, Corky. But I do know that a lot of the African countries are a bit slow off the chocks when it comes to cricket.’
‘Erm … milord.’ The chauffeur negotiated his passage carefully. ‘I don’t believe Mexico is in Africa.’
‘Rats in a sandwich! Where have they put the fumacious place then? Asia?’
‘I believe the country is in the south of America, milord.’
‘Is it? Dashed peculiar the places people put things. And you don’t know whether the boddoes there play cricket or not?’
‘I would think the chances are rather against it, milord.’
‘Never mind. I’ll teach them. Make sure my bat’s packed in the back of the Lag.’
‘Oh? We’ll be taking the Lagonda with us, will we, milord?’
‘Is the King German? Of course we will, Corky. So, get the old bird up to her sprucely best.’
‘The Lagonda is always in perfect condition, milord.’ The chauffeur would have been angry, had anyone other than the young master made the insinuation. ‘Engine tuned as finely as a Stradivarius.’
Neither Corky nor Blotto knew what a Stradivarius was (though Blotto thought it might be a motorcycle), but they had both heard the expression used and taken a fancy to it.
‘And may I ask, milord,’ the chauffeur continued, ‘when we will be setting off on this expedition?’
‘This afternoon,’ the young master replied. ‘Catching a boat that leaves Southampton at ten pip emma. Why, Corky, is that putting too much skiddle under your skink?’
‘Of course not, milord. I am always ready for any service Your Lordship may require of me.’
‘Good ticket, Corky.’ Blotto moved away from the garage. ‘I’ll get my man to trundle some trews into a trunk and we’ll be off in … what, half an hour?’
‘Perfect, milord.’
‘So, we’d better both tick off our to-dos.’
‘Very good, milord.’
Apart from packing, the chauffeur’s main ‘to-do’ was breaking to one of the under-housemaids, for whom he had developed a
tendresse, the news that he was about to leave for an unspecified length of time on a dangerous, and possibly fatal, mission to Mexico.
Blotto’s ‘to-do’ involved imparting the same information, first to his hunter Mephistopheles, who was always very understanding about his master’s excursions. And next to his mother, whose reactions to such news were less predictable.
‘Why, Blotto,’ the Dowager Duchess of Tawcester’s voice rumbled, ‘do you tell me this in a manner which suggests it might be of interest to me?’
‘Well, Mater, I just thought I shouldn’t pongle off to Mexico without sending you a semaphore on the subj.’
‘Blotto, do you think that your presence or absence at Tawcester Towers in any way affects my daily life?’
‘Well, maybe just a widge.’
‘Not even the smallest shaving of a widge fallen from a widge-maker’s bench, Blotto.’
‘Ah. Right. Well. If that’s the way the carpet’s unrolling, then … hoopee-doopee!’
‘You should have got it into your thick skull by now, Blotto, that you have never been of any interest to me, and you never will be of any interest to me, unless your elder brother Loofah gets a one-way ticket to the family vault …’
‘Bong on the nose, Mater.’
‘… in which case we would face the unappetising prospect of having you installed as Duke of Tawcester.’
‘Tickey-tockey!’
‘The one thing I should remind you of, Blotto, on your foreign travels …’
‘Yes, Mater?’
‘… as ever, if you see an opportunity to bring money back with you, or to make money in any way, take it. The Tawcester Towers plumbing is, as always, in serious need of repair.’
‘Yes, Mater. Any way of making money?’
‘Isn’t that what I just said, Blotto?’ the Dowager Duchess thundered. ‘Oh, and if making money involves marrying a foreign heiress, that’s splendid. With the usual proviso … that you stay married to her out wherever you find her. Don’t think of bringing anyone like that back here.’
‘Very good, Mater.’
‘Now, Blotto, leave the Blue Morning Room! One of the advantages of living in a home as generously proportioned as Tawcester Towers is that whole months can go by without our paths crossing. My day is never improved by the sight of you in it.’
In common with the rest of her class, the Dowager Duchess did not believe in showing too much softness in the upbringing of children.
Neither Blotto nor Corky regarded travel as pleasurable in its own right. It was a means of reaching a destination. And, though there might be splendid sights to be seen on the way, nothing could shake their conviction that better views were available back in the Land of Golden Lions. Particularly, back at Tawcester Towers.
What travelling they did do, they liked to do as much as possible under their own steam. Sadly, the Lagonda could not supply the right kind of steam for a crossing of the Atlantic, so for that they had to rely on an ocean liner. But they spent the minimum time they could . . .
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
