It is widely known in W1 that Wooster, Esq., needs his full eight hours. "Hush," the costermonger tells his cat, "Sweet Bertram sleepeth". No Wooster can face the cruel day until awoken by the soft cough of his personal gentleman after an uneventful tryst with tired nature's sweet restorer.
On the day of which I must regretfully speak, the clanging of the doorbell thus sounded as if the nastier bits of Revelations had come to pass, and the Last Trump was not just being sounded but various cherubim and seven-headed Beasts were using my eardrums as cymbals with which to torment the unrighteous.
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I sat up, holding my head - or, at least, I thought it was my head, although it seemed to have grown in size and painfulness since I last checked. When Jeeves materialised, with a shimmer in what that Einstein feller calls the space-time thingamabob, I opened one reproachful eye. "Jeeves," I uttered, keeping my voice low but firm, "I do not wish to be disturbed. Unless it is by a bookie paying up for that bet on Boris' Johnson at Goodwood. Or the greengrocer, delivering muesli." I have recently taken to eating this nourishing Swiss breakfast dish on advice from Oofy Prosser, who assures me that it takes three strokes off a chap's golf handicap. Jeeves does not approve. Foreign muck belongs, he says, on a stick with cocktails, not as an Englishman's breakfast.
"It is Mrs Spenser Gregson, sir", said Jeeves, in a voice notably devoid of sympathy.
Lying down I may have been, but I nonetheless performed a creditable totter. To meet any specimen of the aunt species before breakfast is a trial, but the prospect of meeting my Aunt Agatha unfortified by Swiss concoctions makes one think the Revelations fellow didn't have a vivid enough imagination. "What," I asked weakly, "does she want?"
"It appears, sir, that you have been the subject of another novelistic endeavour." I groaned twice, the second time more softly. Every time one of that blighter Wodehouse's scribbles appears, I have to desert the metropolis and ruralise for a while. Otherwise, complete strangers walk up and poke one in the waistcoast region saying "what about that cow-creamer, eh?", and such like. One toils too long on the fit of one's waistcoats to put up with that sort of thing from the proles. This isn't Soviet Russia.
"Mrs Gregson is disturbed, sir, that in this particular lamentable work, you have been disposed of in marriage to a Young Person, sir. Named, I am sorry to relate, Georgiana."
It would not be an exaggeration to say I was poleaxed as thoroughly as an exiled Communist. This was unlooked-for betrayal. Plum has his faults - a tolerance for the yippier members of the Pekinese family, for one. Still, to read the banns for me unknowingly, and to a Georgiana, no less, is low. Dashed unexpected, from a cove who turned over a useful arm for Dulwich in the old days. Letting the side down somewhat. "Take a telegram, Jeeves," I said, doing my damnedest to sound like an aunt. "To Pelham Iago Wodehouse, Long Island -"
"This is not Mr Wodehouse's doing, sir," said Jeeves, interrupting me as deftly as Anatole slides raw egg into his Hollandaise. "The torch has been taken up by Sebastian Faulks."
The careful reader will perhaps have deduced that Wooster, B., is not at his sharpest before breakfast. Afterwards, I am indeed the pride of the Drones' Charades team. Give me my prandial eggs and b., and I am the same keen intellect that trounced the undeserving to walk off with the Scripture Knowledge prize at Malvern. But mention the dread name Faulks to even a before-breakfast Bertram, and it gives him pause.
A word about this Faulks. He lives in the untracked wilds of Holland Park and is in the rudest of health - a bronzed blighter who plays tennis with the local lads and volunteers as prop forward at the local parish's rugby afternoons. Getting out the old horsewhip and paying him a censorious visit needed to be scratched off the list of options.
Still, there was a Wooster at Agincourt, and possibly at Poitiers, though opinion is divided as to whether he paused for a snifter and missed the battle. Dead ancestors - and one undead enough to be pacing restlessly in my drawing room at the moment - demanded action. It would have been the work of a moment to disguise myself as an Irish gas-man and nick the manuscript from the Faulks' desk drawer, but the dratted thing had already been published.
I put it to Jeeves. Normally, one cannot leave such subtle thinking to one's valet, but Jeeves' suggestions can occasionally approach the casual brilliance of my own cunning plans. "What", I asked Jeeves, "is to be done?"
"I imagine a word with the reviewers is in order, sir." I shuddered. I have met reviewers. Embittered little Bolshies with patchy beards and shifty eyes. "I fancy that, if we gently suggest a few reviews in the style of Mr Wodehouse, public revulsion at their abject failure will be so universal that the book stays unbought. Indeed, I will urge Mrs Gregson to visit the reviewers individually."
I pondered this. It seemed sound. More, it seemed genius. "Capital, Jeeves."
Jeeves flickered an eyebrow in acknowledgement. "After Mrs Gregson leaves, I shall bring in breakfast kippers on a tray," he said. I nodded, for the sake of peace in the home. It could have been much worse. Georgiana! I ask you.