Everything all right, sir?” asked Jeeves, bending solicitously over his young master who was chewing toast with the distracted air of a beagle that could no longer wag its tail.
“Marmalade alright, sir? It’s made from fresh-cut Seville oranges to a recipe by Mrs. Beeton herself. The tea is finest Darjeeling, first flush. I’ve taken the liberty of serving it in the monogrammed teaset sent by your Aunt Agatha last Christmas.”
Jeeves was being obsequious in his attempts to raise the Wooster spirits from the deepest gloom into which they had sunk.
“Jeeves,” said Bertie ominously. “I was in the train yesterday, when I met a curiously affectionate chap who seemed to know all about me. Sebastian something.”
“Faulks, sir, he’s a well-known writer. He’s the first-ever author to be given a follow-up of your novels. He’s always off somewhere attending what has now become a fad, as they say, festivals given over to the glory of authors promoting their own works. They’re especially keen on those parts of the world where English continues to be lingua franca amongst the cognoscenti.”
“I wish you wouldn’t use your Latin so early in the morning, Jeeves. I’ve had trouble sleeping as it is. This Faulks chap seemed to knew all about the Woosters and the tendency of some of us, me in particular, to get into what he called peccadillos , as though it were some genetic disorder. He made a strange reference, Jeeves. To ‘wedding bells’ — Jeeves and the Wedding Bells, he said. My jaw dropped, Jeeves. It was a nasty shock,” Bertie said accusingly.
“He seemed to be suggesting that you, Jeeves, might be thinking of going in the direction of that butler from Downton Abbey whatisname .”
“Carson, sir. Charles Carson. Doing a fine job,” Jeeves settled into a dissertation, but Bertie interrupted testily.
“To the point, Jeeves, plummet to the present, leave Sebastian in the 21st century. Are you proposing to do a Carson?”
“May I suggest that you nodded off in the train, sir? I am after all a gentleman’s gentleman, not a butler.”
Brushing crumbs off Bertie’s pyjama top, Jeeves continued gently, “I was wondering if you had failed to remember that Lady Agatha will be visiting today with a young man whom she calls her Almanac hero, sir?”
“That would be Bend and Shoot. Great Scott. Benjamin rabbit who loves to dig out facts from the mulch of common knowledge and pull them out as turnips for the hungry soul.”
“Indeed sir. The guest in question is an eminence in the publishing world. Ben Schott, if I may remind you, has created a niche with his Almanacs, and has sold three million books in 13 languages.”
“Spare me the details , Jeeves. Only tell me: am I a thing of the past or a merry song of the future in this chap Schott’s scheme of things?”
“It’s hard to say, sir. The book awaits release. Mr. Schott is given to processing facts and presenting them in amusing epigrams. For instance, if I might tax the Wooster memory for a second, do you know how many ships were launched by Helen of Troy?”
“By Jove, Jeeves, the only Helen I can think of is Helen Mirren. She may have landed a few Oscars, but with a face like hers, I can’t imagine many ships setting sail,” replied Bertie, the Wooster mind rapidly moving elsewhere.
“By Schott’s estimation, the quantity of beauty required to launch a single ship is a milli-Helen. The Greeks say Helen’s launched a thousand ships, sir.”
“Like the Wooster tribal myths? They regaled the lives of millions of natives across the empire, Jeeves. How many whiskered colonels and chiffoned aunties in leather armchairs in clubs across the subcontinent must have felt the thrill of a milli-Wooster in their hands!”
“Ahem, sir, if I might remind you.” Jeeves paused a few seconds to allow the moment to sink. “The Wooster tribal myths may not have received the same recognition without the presence of yours truly, Reginald Jeeves, gentleman’s gentleman. Despite all his erudition, Mr. Schott refers to me as ‘valet’, sir. I hope you’ll put him right on that point. I hate to interrupt when there’s a visitor, even if he is dropping in from the 21st century.”
Even before the buzzer had stopped sawing the air with the insistence of a pneumatic drill, Ben Schott burst into the room. Aunt Agatha was behind him, her hair a brilliant shade of Zandra Rhodes pink as has been the trend for ladies of a certain age since the mid-20th century.
Schott, as square and clean-shaven as though he had been modelled on Lego Man, got to the point immediately. Jeeves would enrol in the Junior Ganymede Club for gentlemen’s gentlemen. Now that war was looming and the nation expected every man to do his duty, Jeeves would don the role of a spy. No one knew how to spell ‘fascism’, let alone pronounce it, but the black boots were on the march across Europe. The Woosters would have to throw in their serviettes (not napkins).
We are not privy to what exactly transpired in the drawing room that day, but Aunt Agatha was delighted. Danke schoen! She rather liked marching bands, uniforms and the goose-stepping Aryans with their spider-emblazoned armbands.
“I had no idea it would all end so badly,” she was quoted as saying later when it was all over and more than 80 million people had been killed. “Poor deluded Plum. What a terrible fate. First incarcerated by the Germans and then forced to make those silly broadcasts making him look like a traitor. No wonder he went across the Atlantic and became an American citizen. And now celebrated as the cream of British humorists.”
Jeeves was phlegmatic, but Bertie was whooping. “It really takes the biscuit, Jeeves,” he said. “To be back among the living as a spy.”
The Chennai-based writer is a critic and cultural commentator.
