Something I find outstanding about my friend Bingo Little is his perseverance in tender matters of the heart. Others might flounder. Flail. Wave you on, saying, “You go on, I’m going to rest here a bit.” But not Bingo. He scampers on, following the trail of love with the zest of a moony but surprisingly agile mountain goat. Admirable it may be, but it had landed him in the soup this time, and I had hied it to Vegemite Hall for the long weekend to lend my aid. After setting in motion an infallible plan, I was taking a sanguine spin around the back garden when I met my old fiancé Honoria Glossop leading a horse back to the stable.
“Bertie, I see you behind that tree!” she cried. “It’s been an age. What are you doing here?”
I told her I was there at the behest of young Bingo Little.
“Young Bingo Little?” She laughed and it was like the brass section of a junior high band all blasting a different note at once. “Ha, young Bingo Little. Bingo’s 52 if he’s a day. And how old are you now, Bertie? Never mind. I just turned 50.” She stared at me ghoulishly. “Fif-ty.”
“Yes, I—”
“I’m in perimenopause.”
“Oh—”
“I expected it to be sad, and sometimes it is. After all, you’re saying goodbye to a lot.”
“I imagine—”
“But it also seems to have imbued me with a strange energetic drive. I’ve gotten back into horseback riding. I’m involved in library activism. I drive my dad to all his doctors’ appointments.”
“How is Sir Roderick—”
“I’m writing a novel. I weight lift. I knit. I’ve started a business. I built the website myself. I’m learning tenor guitar.”
“Funny you should mention. I recently composed the most charming libretto—” I interjected. “Even Jeeves has conceded—”
“The only problem is the not sleeping. I get maybe an hour or two a night, like I’m Bill Clinton back in the day. I go to sleep all right, that’s not the problem, but then I wake up with a start at midnight and then I’m a sweaty trash raccoon until maybe four or five a.m. Sometimes I wonder if maybe I just don’t need sleep anymore. Like I’m switching into some other type of being, not quite human. Like a star, heavy and gaseous and emitting my own atmosphere, full of a power that stretches across a galaxy.” A softer voice: “And at the same time totally unexceptional. One of an infinity.”
We had reached the stable. The horses in their stalls flashed their inquisitorial eyes in our direction.
Honoria pointed. “I bet I could overhead press that horse.”
I asked after her younger brother, Oswald.
“He’s fine. He owns the Cotswolds now. Two kids.”
“He was always a charming lad,” I lied.
The sound of a helicopter broke up the tete-a-tete before I could tell her more about my libretto. Bingo’s boss Sir Jermaine Rothbottom had arrived from London. I excused myself.
* * *
Sir Jermaine was one of those chappies who’s made billions and you’re not quite sure how. Bingo had been in his employ for three months now, and even he could offer no enlightenment on what it was Sir Jermaine’s firm did. “I just try to blend,” Bingo told me. One day, at the office, while he was wandering around and trying to look efficient, he’d been introduced to Sir Jermaine’s younger sister Jessamyn.
“It was like lightning struck,” Bingo said. “It crackled up and down the length of me.”
I shivered. “Alarming.”
“No, Bertie, divine.”
The young woman was, Bingo averred, crackerjack in every way. A sunbeam in human form. A will-o-wisp of awesome. She also had some sex stuff in her repertoire that was new to Bingo but apparently all the rage with her generation. It was while riding the vapors of bliss after a lunchtime tryst that Bingo made his fatal error. He had delivered a botched set of contracts to Sir Jermaine’s office, and before he could whip in there with the correct set, the papers had been dispatched by some other person trying to be efficient to Vegemite Hall. There they had landed in the study safe, awaiting the billionaire’s scrutiny over the weekend. If Bingo’s mistake was found out, he was sure to be fired. And then good-bye Jessamyn. As he’d confessed this pickle, Bingo had looked at me with mournful eyes and sighed like a dog on the third day of rain. I clapped him on the shoulder: “Chin up, old pal. Leave it to Bertram Wooster.”
Now, however, watching Sir Jermaine chomp on his soup at dinner, I had some worries. Sir Jermaine had the alert and menacing look of an extremely well-groomed hyena. Like nothing could get by him. Still, what is a Wooster if not stalwart under fire? I steeled myself, then turned to my seat companion to make some charming banter. She, like Honoria, was in a book club with Lady Rothbottom and they were meeting this weekend to discuss Remembrance of Things Past, she informed me.
“Have you read it?” she asked.
“Loved it,” I said, and across the table I heard Honoria Glossop snort.
After dinner, the women stampeded out, eager, they told us, to start their discussion of Proust. The men sat at the table. Bingo strained at conversation. Sir Jermaine trained his eyes on me. “Where did you get your suit?” he asked. Something in his gaze made me uneasy, and shortly after I excused myself to make sure that all the key pieces of my plan were still in place in the man’s study.
I crept my way down the long hall, passing the room where the book club was meeting. The door was ajar, and their voices carried to me.
“It’s this sharp pain in my vagina. Like a piece of paper that’s going to tear.”
“I keep telling you all, you need the cream,” another voice said.
“I am so horny these days I could hump the corner of that sofa.”
“Really? I can’t even remember why I ever wanted to. Like Alexander Skarsgaard could float in on the lake outside, naked and on a half-shell, and I’d just rather be reading an old mystery in bed.”
In the study, I checked under the desk. The firecrackers I’d taped there earlier in the day were in place. Perfect.
I tiptoed back down the shadowy hall. From the study, I heard a woman say, “They say you can have either your ass or your face. But what if it turns out you really can’t have either?”
“My brother does nothing to help with our parents. Nothing! It’s all on me.”
“The cream! I keep telling you. The cream is magic.”
It was Sir Jermaine’s habit to go to his study at 1am, when the Asian markets opened. There were at least two hours till then. I retired for some shuteye.
Soon after falling into slumber, I had a bloodcurdling nightmare. I dreamt that, roused by noises outside, I’d gone to the window of my room. I saw the women in the book club dancing around a bonfire on the lawn, all wearing swimming dresses from L.L. Bean and laughing their heads off. Honoria Glossop was among them. She swayed and whirled and fro while holding up a chair above her head. On the chair was seated a very old woman, her white hair gleaming in the moonlight. On the next whirl, I could see the old woman’s face. It was my Aunt Agatha. My aunt was smiling in a ghastly joyful fashion as around her the women twirled and chanted, “Crone! Crone! Crone!”, the skirts of their L.L. Bean swim dresses whirling with them. At that point of the nightmare, I blacked out.
That is the sort of dream you have when you have too much wine at dinner. It’s cautionary, really.
* * *
My alarm went off at midnight. Bingo and I made our way to the hallway outside the study. We peeped in. There sat Sir Jermaine at his desk. The safe was open and the papers on the desk. All the elements were in place, just as I’d foreseen. As soon as the firecrackers went off at the desk, Sir Jermaine would get up, rush from the study, and Bingo and I would nip in and replace the contract, undetected in the smoke and din.
Bingo whispered to me, “So how are you going to light the firecrackers?”
“Hmm,” I said.
A finger tapped my shoulder. I squealed. A sweaty face loomed at us in the darkness. Honoria Glossop.
She said, “I was awake and heard you two whispering. Tell me, do you have some asinine, over-complicated plan afoot?””
I bristled. I began to outline the plan but before I’d even finished, she put out her hand for the papers.
“I’ll do it.”
“But no, you can’t just go in there!”
“Don’t worry. He won’t see me. Jermaine Rothbottom is constitutionally unable to see a woman who is over the age of 40. The only reason he can still see his wife is because he’s contractually obligated. I’ve met him nine times and he hasn’t remembered me a single time.”
“That’s—”
She cocked her head at me. Her face was shiny with sweat. “Bertie,” she said. “Remember when we were young and madly in love?”
I searched for the right words. “I—”
“I tried to change you then. I thought you were ‘mouldable.’ I was so young and dumb. I see that now, and I’m sorry. You’re a loyal, sweet, good-natured person, Bertie. You’re great how you are. Now let me do this thing for you.”
“Really, I think the firecrackers—”
“Let me,” she said, sounding uncannily like my Aunt Agatha. I handed over the papers.
She walked into the study. Didn’t even tiptoe. Just sashayed across the room in her old bathrobe. Picked up the botched papers from the desk and replaced them with the right ones. Sir Jermaine Rothbottom never even looked over.
Once back outside, she kissed Bingo softly on the cheek. Me on the brow.
Jeeves had appeared soundlessly on the scene with a mug, which he handed to Honoria.
“What is this?” she asked.
“I took the liberty of whipping up a sleep remedy from a receipt I got from Lady Swiffer’s maid,” Jeeves said. “It’s just some warm milk and a teaspoonful of brandy, as well as valerian root, chamomile, magnesium, CBD, melatonin, L-tryptophan, a progesterone pill, and three horse tranquilizers. It should offer you a good night’s rest.”
Honoria smiled. “Thank you, Jeeves,” she said.