大象传媒

Steady As She Goes, Jeeves - Part One
by Robert Ing

As I employed myself with verve and enthusiasm (if those are the words I want) in generously sloshing the the marmalade, it seemed to me that G (as Jeeves once said) was in his H and all was r with the w. I think he may have mentioned something about May, morning, larks and snails but these are mere side-issues which need not detain us. Certainly, when he glided in with the coffee, I was not aware of any of those uncomfortable things...begin with P...premonitions, those are the chaps.

"Morning, Jeeves," I said, "And what a splendid morning too, to be alive
in!"
"Indeed, sir. I do trust that you will remain of that view."

Now when Jeeves starts to talk in this vein, the first premonitions start premonishing about. I suspected he had something to tell me. "I suspect you have something to tell me," I said.

When Jeeves had done, the premonitions, like sorrows, were coming not as single spies but in batallions, as some cove once put it. His news was of the sort that has courtiers in paintings fainting before horrified messengers. My Aunt Agatha, the one who breakfasts daily upon broken bottles and barbed wire, had announced in an early morning telephone call that as she was having her house re-decorated, it was her intention without further ado to descend and break the bread of hospitality with Bertram.

"What did you tell her, Jeeves?" I asked.

"It occurred to me, sir, that the request might be inconvenient to you. I therefore took the liberty of intimating that your movements for the immediate future were somewhat fluid in nature, and that it may not be possible to accommodate her request."

"Topping, Jeeves, topping. It is clearly the time to skidaddle."

Following Aunt Agatha's last visit, I felt the need to vanish as breath in the wind, and for what seem'd corporeal to turn out not to be.

"I have it, Jeeves!" I cried at last. "We'll go to Lower Loxley and park ourselves on Old Oofy Pargetter for a few days. I won't feel safe until we're right out of London with sundry miles of England's g and p between us and Aunt Agatha. Somewhere...somewhere聟"

"Annihilating all that's made / To a green thought in a green shade, sir?"

"You have it, Jeeves," I said. "Fine lines. Your own?"

"The poet Marvell, sir."

"Then if you want my opinion, on this occasion the poet Marvell whanged the nail right on the crumpet."

Now despite these words of courage, the premonitions were not entirely allayed. I will not hear a word against Oofy, who is an old schoolchum and all-round good egg. But the verdict was given way back in the shared happiest days of our lives by Grunter Gibson, an utter pill and maths master of the worst kind: "A generation ago, Pargetter," he said, "your career prospects would have necessitated the purchase of a pig's bladder on a stick," and if Grunter's verdict seems harsh, it has yet to be overturned at appeal. To make matters worse, Oofy has taken unto himself a wife. I am not one of those who claims that Elizabeth Pargetter wrestles crocodiles every morning and breaks swans聮 wings with a single blow of her nose (or whatever the saying is), but then again I wouldn't want to go to the other extreme and say she doesn't.

Like so many unhappy people, Mrs Oofy has relatives, the most imposing of whom (architecturally speaking) is her Aunt Peggy. I'm never quite sure why, but there always seems to be a bit of an east wind in the air whenever she and Bertram are in close proximity; she regards me with the expression of a respectable halibut that has just seen the point of a racy story told it by a younger halibut.

"Jeeves," I said, "What do you make of Mrs Woolley?"
"I wouldn't presume to say, sir."
"But if forced?" I persisted.
"She is a very estimable woman, sir."
"And?"

Jeeves paused, unwilling to give an opinion. Finally he gave his reply.

"Very estimable people can be apt to be a little trying, sir. I have not undertaken detailed research upon the subject, but I consider it possible that Mrs Woolley may be the most trying person in Borsetshire. Maybe in the whole West of England."

I paused in my turn. It was going to be a tricky decision.

Part Two of this spiffing tale appears next week.

More parodies - from Agatha Christie to Damon Runyon