HUTCHINSON HEINEMANN
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The Icebreaker
Frank Skinner
Ihave never made a secret of the fact that, ever since I chose Jeeves to serve at my right hand, he has been, in all matters, barring his rather terse opinions on my appetite for speculative daywear, an absolute brick. Consequently, it shook me somewhat to see him down on all fours, looking up at me like a hound who couldn’t nose the old aniseed. ‘I say, Jeeves, are you pursuing a collar-stud?’ I asked, trying to conceal my burgeoning concern for his good health.
‘No, sir,’ he gasped. ‘I’m afraid being suddenly belched forth by a block of ice caught me somewhat unbraced. Perhaps I could trouble you for some assistance?’
‘I’d be more than happy to muck in, Jeeves, but I’m afraid that, in my case, the old frozen vault hasn’t quite relinquished its grip.’ I raised my left arm to
Jeeves Ag A in
point at my right, still encased in the cold stuff, like a Finnan haddock in a crate.
‘Perhaps you could take the arm and leave the sleeve, sir?’ Jeeves was always a dashed creative cove when it came to extricating oneself from insistent bother. I tensed my shoulder and rotated my arm in a manoeuvre not dissimilar to the one that produced the much-feared googly which once brought me 6 for 54 when I was first change for the Malvern House Second XI. In a flash, I was helping Jeeves back to Homo erectus.
‘Well, I suppose I’d better give Professor Mayhew his five pounds,’ I muttered, with some rue.
‘Are you in the professor’s debt, sir?’ Jeeves asked, always, it seemed to me, slightly affronted at the suggestion that I might live some part of my life free as the feathery ones and temporarily disengaged from his close captaincy.
‘The thing is, Jeeves, I bet the professor five pounds that he couldn’t freeze me in a block of ice for a whole hour without me perishing in the first twelfth. He insisted that I’d emerge, as the clock marked sixty minutes, fresh as a daisy. And, blast it all, he was spot on.’
‘If the experiment had caused you to expire, sir, how did you intend to receive your winnings?’
‘Well, in cash, obviously,’ I rejoined. ‘I wouldn’t risk a cheque from that scoundrel.’
Jeeves was generally as sharp as a tack, but it seemed the big freeze had somewhat hampered his reasoning. ‘I fail to see why I was also frozen,’ he said, in a tone that had much in common with indignation.
‘Yes. I wasn’t expecting us both to get the shove,’ I confessed. ‘Dashed tight squeeze in that freezer thing. He’ll probably claim double-bubble, but we shook hands on a fiver and I’m d—’
‘Does it seem odd to you, sir, that the room has changed so considerably in the course of that frozen hour?’ Jeeves suddenly enquired.
‘Well, that’s because it’s a different room altogether,’ I explained. ‘Anyone can see that. Mayhew must have shoved us in a storeroom or the like. Probably keen to get me out of the way so he could continue flirting with Millicent. The old goat was positively salivating. I thought I was going to have to take a chamois leather to the poor girl.’
‘I could be mistaken, sir,’ he said with a tone of disbelief that rather undermined that suggestion, ‘but if one might ignore the dust, the cobwebs, the peeling paint and other signs of neglect, magnified, it seems, by the passage of time, the room is just as it was when we were bundled into the ice-chamber. There is the professor’s desk, with its test tubes and jars. Here, the framed reproduction of the Periodic Table. There, the ashtray where you and the other gentlemen rested
Jeeves Ag A in your cigars.’ Jeeves was waving his arms around as though he was communicating the prices for a twelvehorse handicap in fluent tic-tac. ‘And there, the door where I entered the scene, enticed by the roar of motors and the loud crackle of electricity.’
‘Bally awful, that cheroot,’ I said. ‘Scientific types, they’re all the same, Jeeves. They get awfully feverish about cobalts and calciums but spend no time at all on choosing a decent smoke.’
‘My contention, sir—’ Jeeves continued, with some increase in volume, stubbing out my cigar talk with an abruptness prompted, I felt, by simmering impatience.
Look, at this point, I feel I must interject and declare, with the greatest respect, and all that rot, that Jeeves could be quite curt if he felt I wasn’t totally buying into one of his brainwaves. He was usually right, of course, but being ‘usually right’ was the cross that Jeeves had been fated to bear and I, on occasions such as this, often found myself cast as his Simon of Cyrene.
‘My contention,’ he repeated, with the underlying frustration of someone forced to call their dog to heel for a second time, ‘is that we have been in the ice for a good deal longer than sixty minutes.’
My response featured a small stagger. ‘Oh, Jeeves! I hope you’re not saying what I think you’re saying.’
‘I fear I am, sir.’
‘But surely I’ll be back on the clock for lunch with Freddie at the Withington?’ His nose-wrinkling suggested that my prompt arrival for that appointment was far from certain. ‘I mean, there’s no real need to change the old togs. If anything, the icy interlude has spruced up the whole ensemble. I wouldn’t be the first gentleman to arrive for lunch at the Withington in his evening wear. I could, at least, cross the finishing line in time for a tarte Tatin ?’
Completely ignoring my plea for reassurance, Jeeves said, ‘Might you help me with this door, sir? We seem to have been incarcerated.’ He rattled an uncooperative handle.
‘Oh, that’s bad form,’ I exclaimed, as I offered Jeeves an extra shoulder. ‘We’d best be brisk or poor Millicent will be in danger of losing her good name. That old test tube twiddler has probably already swooped to swaddle her in swan’s wing, as, I think, the Greek expressed it.’ I’m not totally sure what the Greek meant, in that instance, but it conjures up the sort of behaviour a decent chap might think rather forward. Jeeves is often compelled to put me right on my poetic allusions but the sudden bursting open of the door provided a helpful distraction. We stepped through it, Jeeves struck a lucifer, and we inched our way through timber and rubble ‘amid the encircling
Jeeves Ag A in gloom’ as the cardinal so neatly put it. The papist writers are dashed good when it comes to gloom and the like. We scrambled about in the old ‘encircling’ for what seemed like an absolute age. We climbed unreliable stairs, we tiptoed over absent floorboards. The prof didn’t mind risking five pounds on a reckless wager, but he clearly drew the line at paying seven shillings a week for a diligent maid.
Jeeves pulled and prodded at various sections of wall but the black-bat night had definitely not flown and didn’t seem to be in any hurry to do so. Then, at last, he tore at a whole section of boards and rails that eventually fell away to reveal a high window. Light didn’t exactly stream in, but it did its very best to illuminate the grime. To my surprise, Jeeves scurried up the wall like a marmoset and came to rest on an elevated ledge. He wiped a pane of the window with his fingers, peered out in silence and then, after a pause in which he seemed to be deliberately gathering himself, he beckoned me to share his shelf and have an observatory ogle.
When, with some help from my sturdy valet, I finally reached the perch, I gazed outward and audibly gasped. Jeeves, I felt, would have gasped in a similar fashion but by now he was on an I-told-youso mission that was too urgent to be interrupted by an expulsion of air.
‘As I said, sir,’ he almost purred, ‘a good deal longer than sixty minutes.’
In my youth, I travelled to Italy. My Latin master, the Reverend Nantwich, had long trumpeted the merits of the Roman poets. Such was the persuasive nature of his blah-blah-blah that a classmate, Porky Ellwood-Smythe, and I set off to breathe the air they breathed, if you’ll forgive the intimate nature of my metaphor. Turned out the modern blighters had ditched Latin and replaced it with a language with which we were not familiar. The second revelation was that the Eternal City was quite different from Mayfair and its environs. We anticipated the odd pagoda to add a dash of local colour but we certainly weren’t anticipating anything quite so, well, foreign.
But now I looked upon a scene even stranger, even more alien and, in some inexplicable way, one made particularly unsettling by the odd flash of the familiar. There were many automobiles of various colours, with chassis much less interrupted by horns and levers than was the usual. For all that, they didn’t seem to be moving any faster than the ones I was used to. The inhabitants of the scene were certainly a strange lot. There was a young man whose trousers were worn so low that, even at this distance, I could see the upper part of his underthings. I couldn’t decide whether aforesaid trousers were falling down
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or he was rising up out of them. There was a woman carrying a dog and pulling a suitcase behind her, in a complete reversal of the norm. But, at the same time, just across the street was the local branch of my bank that I regularly frequented to top up the lolly for some jaunt or other and, some fifty yards to my left, the dear old Church of St Boniface, where I’d joined the congregation for Binky Baxter’s memorial service. Poor chap had mistaken some fearsome fungus for a scarlet elf cup. Thus he died of ignorance, a merciless killer that has done for so many of my social group.
The shops seemed more colourful, the windows much larger. There were sausages and newspapers, pretty much the staples of life, but there were also things that left me startled. One grocery shop boasted, on its frontage, that it sold cider for three pounds a bottle. Three pounds! I should scarcely spend that on a demi of Château Lafite. Strangely, the architecture above the shops seemed as before. It was as if the buildings had risen up out of the pavement, like that young chappie had risen up out of his slacks, to reveal retail-driven underthings that had been previously hidden below.
The positioning of the bank and the proximity of the church showed that Jeeves was, as per usual, quite right. The evidence did indeed suggest that the room
we had woken in was the same one in which Professor Mayhew pulled that joystick, sending poor Jeeves and I off on our frosty whatevers. ‘Earth stood hard as iron / Water like a stone,’ as the poet says, and we two fellows had pretty much followed suit. But that still didn’t explain ‘this brave new world that hath such people in it’ which we gazed upon, from our dusty vantage point.
‘I say, Jeeves,’ I piped up, gesturing towards the street, ‘how do you explain this brave new world that has such people in it?’
‘I believe, sir, the Bard elides the last two words to “in’t”.’
‘Hard times, price of paper,’ I replied. ‘Even the greats must sometimes economise. Sobering thought but there you have it. Thing is, Jeeves, I’m less concerned with Shakespeare’s stationery cupboard than I am with our current state of affairs. What on earth has happened to the high street? Where are the parasols, where are the boaters and, as for the emporia, please tell me,’ I said, now pointing at a nearby shop sign, ‘what level of moral observance and oldfashioned piety is required to guarantee a pilgrim his place in Vape Heaven?’
Jeeves, at first, seemed reticent to reply but soon recovered his natural assurance. ‘I cannot answer your theological question, sir, but as to the disappearance
Jeeves Ag A in
of familiar items of fashion, I believe that parasols, boaters and a good many other accoutrements are no longer en vogue.’
‘Dash it all, Jeeves! I ask for clarity and what do you give me? French!’
‘Forgive me, sir. My theory is that parasols and boaters have simply gone out of fashion’.
‘Out of fashion?’ I said, my incredulity unhidden by my tone. ‘In sixty minutes?’
‘Perhaps you could help me with this window, sir?’ he said, rather pointedly changing the subject.
I was becoming uneasy about this new trend, i.e. Jeeves asking me to help him with things.
Getting him to his feet, forcing various locks and handles: our relationship was beginning to veer towards democracy. That simply wouldn’t do. Jeeves may well be cleverer than me, but the basic social order must not be strained. It seemed to me that if one agrees to carry the dog, one will soon end up leading the suitcase. Even in the midst of all this confusion and strangeness, I was rather pleased with that thought. Again, I wasn’t completely sure what I meant by it, but I had the feeling it might qualify as an adage.
Oh, I say! I’d invented an adage. I’d only discovered what one was a few weeks ago. Jeeves had given me a bit of an ‘adages for beginners’ chat at the Cheltenham
racecourse following my confused response to something he’d said about a fool and his money. Now I was in the know on the adage front, it was my intention to jolly well slot one in at every opportunity, even if, as in this instance, it was to remain unspoken. I mean, I had only become aware of the dog/suitcase turnaround two minutes ago and now here I was employing it as wordplay. I should have liked to try it on Jeeves while it was still warm from the pan, so to speak, but I decided the matter of the master becoming the servant was a bit too volatile to air in this current situation. Instead, I followed my valet’s instructions and, pretty soon, after much strain and straddling, we were standing outside the house.
‘Right,’ I said, shortly after our soles hit terra firma. ‘I’m going to give that scoundrel a piece of my mind and take poor Millicent straight home. I mean, it’s daylight, for goodness’ sake! Her poor mother will be a fountain of tears.’
‘That might prove difficult, sir,’ Jeeves said, pointing over my right shoulder. I turned to the wall behind me to find a blue plaque, emblazoned with the following dedication:
professor bernard mayhew 1878– 1969 pioneer of cryogenics. lived and worked in T his building.
Jeeves Ag A in
‘What a thing!’ I muttered, with some confusion. ‘I have to admit, Jeeves, I did not notice that when we arrived last night. Some ruse for avoiding debtors, I shouldn’t be surprised.’ I read it again. ‘What the devil is cryogenics?’
‘There was an article about it in The Times, sir. It seems someone froze a rat in a block of ice for two weeks or so. When the ice was finally melted, the rat emerged unharmed.’
‘Well,’ I said, supportively, ‘that is fascinating, Jeeves, but we must try and stick to matters that are relevant to our current situation.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘The thing is, we’re too bally smart for him. We weren’t born under a mulberry bush, yesterday, and all that. No mocked-up memorial is going to stop me from giving that charlatan a piece of my mind,’ I announced, striding towards the prof’s front door. Jeeves eyed me like a pretty girl watching an army march towards certain annihilation. I had no idea he was so afraid of the professor. Undeterred, I reached for the front doorbell. Something else I hadn’t noticed last night was that the man of science had, in fact, four doorbells. Some harebrained experiment or other, no doubt. Or was it? Each button had a small nameplate next to it. There was a dentist, something called a Wellness
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Clinic, a cranial something-or-other – I should not have been surprised to discover another annex of Vape Heaven – but there was no mention of Mayhew. I’m not sure exactly how I looked at Jeeves, at this juncture, but it may well have been pleadingly.
‘Perhaps we might sit here, sir,’ he said, pointing at a suitable wall. ‘I fear you are not altogether grasping our predicament.’
‘So, you’re seriously telling me we have woken up in 1969?’
‘I suspect it is some time even later than that, sir,’ Jeeves replied. ‘The plaque does not have the look of a recent addition.’
I placed my head in my hands. It was quite a thing to consider. Like when the bridge club finally discovered the truth about the Reverend Harper.
‘Of course, there is one sure way of discovering the actual date,’ Jeeves said. He patted my back reassuringly as we walked towards the bank.
‘But I don’t feel any older, Jeeves,’ I protested as we walked. ‘I mean, I’ve hardly a bristle. We should both have beards like sages.’
‘I believe our entire bodily functions were suspended, sir.’
Jeeves Ag A in
‘Steady on, Jeeves,’ I said, slightly affronted. ‘Keep the party clean and all that.’
‘Forgive me, sir,’ he replied. ‘It seems time travel has made me somewhat skittish.’
We entered the bank. Jeeves was right. (A phrase I would happily carve on his headstone if I had the chisel skills.) I recognised the large, ornate glass case above the counters, in which the calendar mechanism was held. The case, at least, had not changed a jot. The date, however, had changed considerably: 7 July 2025. We sat, simultaneously, on a convenient wooden bench.
‘But Jeeves, we’ve slept for almost a hundred years. I didn’t sleep that long when I was at Eton.’ We sat in silence, both, I assumed, giving a good deal of serious thought to the situation. ‘Well, that’s ta-ta to the tarte Tatin,’ I eventually concluded.
‘Quite, sir,’ he sighed. We sat amongst our own thoughts for some further minutes. At last, I gave in.
‘So, come on, Jeeves, what’s the plan?’ I entreated.
‘Plan, sir?’
‘Yes. The plan. How do we get back to 1929?’ He went quite pale. It could only mean one thing. I had to accept the unacceptable. He did not have a plan. It was like getting a wet rugger ball smack in the solar plexus. ‘But dash it, Jeeves, you always have a plan,’ I protested. He went even paler, like those terrifying
portraits of Good Queen Bess, when she looks like a French clown.
‘I think I need a little air,’ he mumbled, and left the bank. It was, I thought, pretty rum behaviour, leaving a fellow on his lonesome in the wrong century. I was about to snuggle down into a warm blanket of self-pity when someone spoke to me.
‘Can I help you, sir?’ she said. She was bespectacled and quite lank in the hair department.
‘Probably not,’ I said, slightly cranking up the tone of despair. Why is it that one’s actual, authentic tone of despair never seems quite good enough? It’s like when one’s ill. I think to myself, well, I am ill but if I just be ill, with no trimmings or performance, no one will believe me. I need to contrive an extra level, for effect. And then I end up doing a regular David Garrick.
‘Do you have an account with us?’ the lady asked.
‘Erm, well, I’m not sure. I certainly used to have an account with you, but I’ve been . . . er . . . inactive for some time. You see, I met this scientist . . .’
‘Well, if you’d like to come to the counter, sir, we can check your balance. If you’ve been with us for some time, it might be that you’ve accrued interest on your savings . . .’
Jeeves Ag A in
‘I say, Jeeves. I think we should try and be a tad more positive about this situation,’ I said, emerging from the bank like a forty-niner who’d just hit pay dirt. ‘The Woosters have always made the best of a bad job, even when things looked hopeless. When my Great-Uncle Walter was challenged to a duel—’
‘Perhaps we should read a newspaper, sir,’ he said, gesturing towards a fellow standing with a bundle of them, a little further down the road. ‘It might help us get a better idea of what kind of world we find ourselves in.’
‘Yes, Jeeves. It will probably be a dashed exciting read. You stay there.’ His usual skin tone was slowly returning. I marched off towards the newspaper vendor. The fellow thrust one in my hand as soon as I came within reach.
‘How much?’ I asked.
‘Oh, a hundred pounds should cover it,’ he replied with a rather over-familiar sparkle. He was a handsome young fellow, very blue eyes, but he seemed to have chosen ‘bedraggled’ as his signature look. He wore a sort of undershirt, with no collar, which had a large tick across the chest area, as though he had won the approval of some draper.
‘Oh, I say,’ I protested. ‘I could get thirty-three bottles of cider for that and still have change.’
‘Well,’ he countered, his sparkle evolving into a
positive dazzle, ‘they say an apple a day keeps the doctor away. And I don’t remember anyone saying that apple couldn’t be fermented.’ My previous pride at being an exponent of the adage was somewhat reduced. If adages were the stock in trade of mere newspaper sellers, I should have to find something more exclusive. I handed him a hundred pounds from the large wad I had just withdrawn from the bank. It would not, I lamented to myself, last long in a world where even newspapers were so expensive. I had not become as rich as I thought.
The blue-eyed man’s dazzle suddenly descended like a basement-bound elevator. It didn’t even stop at ‘sparkle’ on the way down. He too took on the pallor of the Virgin Queen. He seemed to be in shock. I looked about me to discover what had rocked him so, but it was hard for me to discern any particular ‘unusual’ in an wholly unusual world.
I dashed back to Jeeves who seemed much more like his old self. ‘I need to give some thought to accommodation, sir. Berkeley Mansions will certainly have a new resident. Indeed, it may no longer be extant.’ I might have found myself suddenly homeless, but I still had enough self-respect to resist asking him the meaning of ‘extant’. ‘But what about my belongings?’ I said. ‘I should be sad to think those pink spats have gone for ever.’
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‘The loss of “those pink spats”, sir, is one of the few pools of light in a sea of darkness,’ he replied. Personally, I thought that was a bit strong but any risk of estrangement, just at the minute, seemed unwise. I did not wish to find myself, like the beadyeyed mariner, ‘alone on an open sea’ so to speak.
At that moment, a young woman, clearly in a state of some distress, approached us, pointing and shouting as if the barbarians were at the gate. The first thing that struck one about her was her red hair. I don’t mean red hair such as is commonly found spouting from one of our Celtic brethren. I mean red hair as in hair that is the exact shade of a fine claret. I assumed she was some sort of theatrical who’d stepped out for a breath of the fresh stuff during a convenient interval. One could imagine her confidently predicting the next Thane of Cawdor. I will not directly quote what she said to Jeeves and myself because it was interspersed with a good deal of barrack-room language, but her thrust was that the man she pointed out, racing away down the street, was a thief and that we should pursue him with some purpose. I thought she said he had stolen her phone but that seemed highly unlikely unless she lived close by. He was certainly not trailing cable.
Jeeves did not seek further clarification of the man’s crime, but set off like a lurcher at the heels of a
hare. I had no idea he could move so fast. The young woman, with little regard for her abandoned cauldron, followed close behind. Her surprisingly long stride was unhindered by the usual ladies’ apparel. She was wearing some sort of plimsolls and her skirt, if one might call it that, was so short I assumed it to be an undergarment. It was, I supposed, possible that her actual skirt was what the man had stolen. Of course, her get-up could have been theatrical togs but surely no sensible witch would approach a blasted heath in such scant covering.
All this pontification had left me at rather a disadvantage so far as catching the crook was concerned. I hadn’t really run since school but the alternative – turning on my heels to seek a nice pavement café and a pot of Bohea – didn’t seem quite the gentlemanly thing to do, so off I shot.
I managed to catch up with my fellow-hounds just in time to see the hare board a departing omnibus. He soon appeared at the upper rear window of the vehicle, waving some illuminated rectangular object and grinning triumphantly. She of the red hair turned on me with some venom. Her coarse language was now almost completely uninterrupted by acceptable utterance. It seemed that I had unintentionally put the tin hat on her already awful afternoon when, as the man’s laughing face had disappeared into the
Jeeves Ag A in distance, I’d instinctively waved. I argued that he began the waving process, but she countered with a stream of unpleasantness. Again, it seemed to include the word ‘phone’ but I would be loath to report any other details.
‘Taxi,’ I heard Jeeves call and turned to find he had brought a hackney carriage to a kerbside halt. Having recovered from his initial shock, he now seemed less disturbed by the twenty-first century than he was by my pink spats.
Jeeves asked the cabbie if he would be so kind as to pursue the omnibus until it came to a designated halt, so that we might change the proverbial horses in midstream. I sat as far away from the turbulent theatrical as the cab’s seating would allow, only then to disturb the waters further by asking if she was acquainted with the fellow on the bus. In short, she felt him unworthy of her friendship and fully intended to gouge out his eyes when we had him in our grip. I had imagined her involved in the Scottish play but now I pictured her prising the blinkers out of poor old Gloucester. And I did not like the way her thumbs were flexing and unflexing in rabid anticipation.
‘So, the object waved from the bus window was your telephone?’ Jeeves enquired. His now-recovered composure ‘rebuked the winds and the sea and all
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was calm’ or something of that sort. At the mention of her phone, her left thumb suddenly fell lifeless but her right gained considerable speed and vigour. I was beginning to hope that the thief might make a getaway. I did not wish to get ‘vile jelly’ on what was currently my only outfit.
‘I was calling my mum,’ she explained, finally uttering something that could be related in direct speech. ‘She’ll be worried to death,’ she continued. ‘I was telling her about . . .’ She seemed to question whether candour was advisable in this instance and then cast caution, if not quite to the winds, then certainly in their general direction. ‘My relationship has recently ended, well, been ended, and my mum is very supportive.’ I think I felt less discomfort when she was screaming at me. This was hardly a conversation for mixed company. But then, to my surprise, nay, to my horror, Jeeves chimed in.
‘I was once what one might call “close” to a seamstress in Kennington,’ he began. ‘We would walk in the park, arm-in-arm. I don’t know that I’ve ever been prouder or happier to be seen out in public with someone.’
I must admit I was genuinely hurt by that latter remark. Luckily, the intense heat being generated by my current embarrassment served to cauterise the wound.
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‘We spoke of marriage, of children even,’ he continued.
I began to consider the risks of leaping from a moving vehicle.
‘But then,’ Jeeves said, with a slight tremble in his voice, ‘I received a letter which . . .’ He faltered and fell silent. The woman took his hand in hers. He looked into her eyes. ‘It was a long time ago,’ he murmured.
‘It certainly was,’ I interjected. Jeeves looked anxiously across as if I was about to reveal all but even I could see that a yarn about being frozen in a block of ice for a hundred years would do little to reduce the already gargantuan awkwardness of the current conversation. Instead, I decided to go in from the top diving board.
‘The only female who really broke my heart came second in the St Leger,’ I said, with a wistful look through the cab window. The thespian glowered at me as if I was joking. The confessional thing, it transpired, wasn’t really my forte. Once again, my authentic tone of despair had let me down. If only I’d had the courage to attempt a trembling voice.
Happily, the cabbie chipped in with some oldfashioned lower-class practicality. ‘Here’s the bus,’ he announced. ‘That’ll be thirteen quid.’ I handed him twenty as I scrambled onto the pavement.
Jeeves and his new friend raced towards the bus, and, to my great dismay, they were still holding hands. I’m not a person who gets flustered about an age difference – my Great-Uncle Morty, a notorious philanderer, married a chambermaid who was young enough to be his granddaughter, only to eventually discover that she was precisely that – but this was really pushing it. Jeeves must’ve been only a few scampered singles away from one hundred and fifty.
The thief clearly saw us coming because he suddenly emerged from the stationary vehicle and bounded down a nearby alley. This passageway was so narrow that Jeeves and the actress had to abandon their impromptu hand-holding and switch to single file in order to continue the pursuit. I tagged on behind, happy to let Jeeves get all the glory. The alley terminated in a small, closed-off courtyard. As we came to a halt at its centre, we realised our quarry had stopped just inside the entrance. That entrance had now become an exit and one that was blocked by the thief. He had pocketed the twenty-first-century telephone and was holding, instead, a large knife.
‘I’m going to walk out of this alley and wait at the end,’ he said with a snarl. ‘The first one to come out gets sliced.’
I was transfixed by the knife’s sizeable blade.
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This was partly due to its obvious menace but also because, along its length, letters had been cut out to spell a word: P-I-Z-Z-A. It looked like Italian to me. He was probably one of Mussolini’s lot. He even wore a black shirt. It had two awful skulls pictured on its lower half and more Italian lingo – ‘Metallica’ – emblazoned across the chest.
‘It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve used—’ Our fascist assailant broke off abruptly, mid-sentence, and dropped suddenly to his knees. His swagger sank like a badly managed sponge cake. A second man had appeared in the alley and now had the black-shirted criminal in a very restrictive-looking headlock. I couldn’t make out the new arrival’s face at first – it was somewhat concealed behind the Italian’s black curls – but soon I saw a familiar pair of very blue eyes. He called to me, through the tresses, ‘I’ve been following you since you paid for that newspaper.’
‘Should I have tipped?’ I asked, wondering if the fascist, currently becoming a little blue from lack of oxygen, had committed the same faux pas. Oh, now I was talking French. It had been a very trying day.
‘Can one of you phone the police?’ the newspaper vendor asked. The red- headed one looked at Jeeves and me in some anticipation. ‘Neither I nor Mr Wooster have a “phone”,’ Jeeves said. The actress and the blue- eyed man stared at us,
dumb-founded. I cannot speak for my valet but it would not be an overstatement to say that I experienced, for some unfathomable reason, genuine shame. At this point, the crook, now lavender in hue, reached into his pocket and offered the stolen phone to his restrainer. I knew it to be the stolen phone because, as it appeared, our female associate whimpered like a mother who’d seen her child climbing from a newly moored lifeboat to the safety of the dock. She leaped forward and clutched it, passionately, to her breast.
‘I need to call my mum first,’ she said. We four watched in silence as she fired out her story. It was a relief to realise that, when speaking to her mother, her vocabulary, unlike the poor phone thief, became considerably less blue. ‘I chased him with two posh blokes I met,’ she explained. Jeeves and I exchanged a look. We could not prevent the upward movement of our collective eyebrows. ‘No, Mum, they’re not all stupid. It seems to be about fifty per cent.’ At this point, I thought it best to stop listening.
‘I’m Richard,’ said, well, Richard. He of the newspaper industry. ‘I would shake your hand but . . .’
‘You need both of them for strangling,’ I interjected, helpfully.
‘You gave me a hundred pounds for the newspaper. I couldn’t believe it. I thought it might be fake
Jeeves Ag A in
money but when I realised it wasn’t I jumped on my bike and followed you.’
‘If only I could follow you,’ I said. ‘I have no idea what you mean.’
‘The newspaper is free,’ he explained. ‘The hundred pounds thing was just a stupid joke’.
‘Free?’ I said, aghast. I turned to Jeeves. He shook his head.
‘We have much to discuss, sir.’
‘Yes. Quite,’ I said, the realisation of our predicament suddenly vivid again. ‘Look,’ I said to Richard, ‘keep the ton. I rather admire your honesty and, by jingo, you got us out of a pretty awful scrape with this chappie.’
‘Oh, thank you. That’s amazing,’ he beamed. I was, it has to be said, expecting a bit more of the old ‘No, I couldn’t possibly’ but the fellow had earned it and, truth be told, a hundred years of interest had left me pretty flush. If we were living in a world where newspapers were free, I probably wouldn’t need much cash, anyway.
By now, she of the red hair was introducing herself to Richard. ‘I’m Andrea,’ she said. Richard was twinkling again.
‘She’s an actress,’ I explained.
‘No, I’m not. I’m a tattooist,’ she snapped. Good
Lord! I’d assumed all those snakes and serpents were part of her make-up.
‘Oh, I was thinking of getting some tats,’ Richard, now on full dazzle, said to her. Good idea, I thought. I was starting to feel pretty hungry, myself. ‘Do you fancy a coffee or something?’ he continued. She mirrored his zeal. Jeeves and I bowed and left the scene.
‘Do you think young love is blossoming, Jeeves?’ I queried as we moved out of their earshot.
‘I think it not out of the question, sir.’ We looked back down the alley. The courtyard was bathed in sunlight. ‘I must say,’ he went on, ‘the suffocating felon provides an unlikely chaperon.’
‘I thought you were falling for inky Andrea yourself, at one point,’ I said, with what, I’m ashamed to admit, could probably be described as a leer.
‘No, sir,’ he said, firmly. ‘In truth, I found her to be something of a wildcat – albeit a broken-hearted one. However, I was prepared to use empathy in order to prevent a public blinding.’
‘Ah, I see,’ I said, to the loud accompaniment of a penny dropping. ‘So the seamstress—’
‘To return to the subject of accommodation, sir,’ he said, with a sudden practicality of tone, ‘I believe I might be able to guide us to the Savoy hotel from here.’ We walked on in the sunshine, remarking on all
Jeeves Ag A in the wonders of this new world. ‘Of course, there is the small matter of back-pay,’ he casually remarked, at one point.
‘There is also the small matter of sleeping on the job,’ I rejoined. We walked on.
‘As I said, sir, we have much to discuss.’