Free Pigs Have Wings by P. G. Wodehouse

tennis racquet.’
    For some time after the line had gone dead, an observer, had one been present in Flat Twenty-three, Prince of Wales Mansions, Battersea Park Road, would have been able to see what a young man standing at the crossroads looked like, for during that period Gerald Anstruther Vail sat wrestling with himself, torn this way and that, a living ganglion of conflicting emotions.
    The thought of cancelling his dinner with Penny, of not seeing her after all, of not gazing into her eyes, of not holding her little hand, was about as unpleasing a thought as had ever entered his mind. It is not too much to say that it gashed the very fibres of his being.
    On the other hand, if Gloria had meant what she said, if by conferring with her at Mario’s, there was really a chance of learning a method of getting his hooks on that two thousand, would it not be madness to pass it up?
    Aeons later he decided that it would. The money was his passport to Paradise, and he knew Gloria Salt well enough to be aware that, though a girl of kind impulses, she was touchy. Spurn her, and she stayed spurned. To refuse to meet her at Mario’s and hear her plan for conjuring two thousand pounds out of thin air, which seemed to be what she had in mind, would mean pique, resentment and dudgeon. She would drop the subject entirely and decline to open it again.
    Heavily, for the load on his heart weighed him down, he rose and began to turn the pages of the telephone book. Chez Lady Garland, whoever she might be, Penny had said she would be during her brief stay in the great city, and there was a Garland, Lady with a Grosvenor Square address among the G’s. He dialled the number, and hooked what sounded like a butler.
    ‘Could I speak to Miss Donaldson?’
    He could not. Penny, it appeared, was out having a fit. A what? Oh, a fitting? Yes, I see. Any idea when she will be back? No, sir, I am unable to say. Would you care to leave a message, sir?
    ‘Yes. Will you tell Miss Donaldson that Mr Gerald Vail is terribly sorry but he will be unable to give her dinner tonight owing to a very important business matter that has come up.’
    ‘Business matter, sir?’
    ‘That’s right. A most important business matter.’
    ‘Very good, sir.’
    And that was that. But oh, the agony of it. Replacing the receiver, Jerry slumped into a chair with a distinct illusion that mocking fiends were detaching large portions of his soul with red-hot pincers.
    At Wiltshire House, Grosvenor Square, residence of Dora, relict of the late Sir Everard Garland, K.C.B. , Lady Constance Keeble was not feeling any too good herself. Jerry had made his call at the moment when Riggs, the butler, was bringing tea for herself and Lord Vosper, who had looked in hoping for buttered toast and a chat with Penny, and it had taken her attention right off the pleasures of the table.
    ‘Sinister’ was the word that flashed through Lady Constance’s mind. ‘Sir,’ Riggs had said, indicating that the mysterious caller was of the male sex, and she was at a loss to comprehend how – unless the girl had told him – any mysterious male could know that Penny was in London. And if she had told him, it implied an intimacy which froze her blood.
    ‘Who was that, Riggs?’
    ‘A Mr Gerald Vail, m’lady, regretting his inability to entertain Miss Donaldson at dinner tonight.’
    Training tells. ‘Ladies never betray emotion, Connie dear,’ an early governess of Lady Constance’s had often impressed upon her, and the maxim had guided her through life. Where a woman less carefully schooled might have keeled over in her chair, possibly with a startled ‘Golly!’ she merely quivered a little.
    ‘I see. Thank you, Riggs.’
    She picked up the cake with jam in the middle which had fallen from her nerveless fingers and ate it in a sort of trance. The discovery that, on the pretext of dining with her father’s old friend Mrs Bunbury, Penelope Donaldson had been planning to sneak off and revel