Blotto, Twinks and the Intimate Revue Read online

  Blotto, too, found something in Light and Frothy that tickled his fancy. There was a girl in the sketches who played the cheeky, soubrette roles. She rejoiced in the name of Dolly Diller and spoke in a throaty Cockney voice, which had a very powerful effect on Blotto’s sensibilities. Her black, bob-cut hair reminded him of a former love, the film star Mimsy La Pim. But Mimsy had suffered from many disadvantages, not least among them being American, while Dolly was as English as jellied eels. Blotto, with the ill-defined optimism which characterised all of his relations with women, wondered whether he might get an opportunity to meet her after the show.

  Neither he, nor Twinks, nor Whiffler, had been aware of the man who slipped into the back of the theatre near the end of the revue, and trained a revolver on their box. But for the standing ovation, which blocked his sightline, he would have pulled the trigger.

  ‘God, you look ravishing,’ said Jack Carmichael.

  ‘Oh, don’t talk such toffee,’ came Twinks’s instinctive response. But she couldn’t deny that the man had piqued her interest. Close to, he looked even better than he had from the auditorium. He was as lithe and toned as a panther. He’d undone his white tie, and a white towel hung around his neck. Over his make-up there was a sheen of sweat from his exertions in the dancing.

  Twinks recognised the glazed look in his eyes. In common with so many amorous swains before, Jack Carmichael had fallen for her like a guardsman in a heatwave. But in his case, she didn’t mind. When he suggested they go out for dinner together, she thought the idea was ‘Splendissimo!’

  In the adjacent dressing room, Giles ‘Whiffler’ Tortington sported the same glazed expression as Jack Carmichael had. But his was directed towards Frou-Frou Gavotte, whose stage costume had now been replaced by a peignoir as light and frothy as the show she had just completed.

  In Blotto’s view, she was a pretty enough girl, though Twinks obviously had the edge in the Most Beautiful Girl in the World Competition. His sister, he knew, would have romped it against any opposition.

  Frou-Frou Gavotte could have been described as blonde and petite, both of which adjectives matched her French name. Her voice, however, when not using the clipped vowels required on stage, was pure, rasping Cockney. Because of his somewhat sheltered background, Blotto had not had the good fortune to meet a Billingsgate fishwife, but, if he had, then he would have known that Frou-Frou sounded exactly like one.

  It seemed unlikely that Whiffler’s Aged P had ever met a Billingsgate fishwife either (you don’t see many of those round Hunt Balls – or the House of Lords, come to that), but Blotto was still not certain that he would warm to one as a prospective daughter-in-law. Whiffler himself was blind to any kind of objections that might be made. He was, of course, looking with the eyes of love.

  ‘Isn’t Frou-Frou just wonderful in the show?’ he demanded of his friend.

  ‘Oh, a real cork-popper,’ Blotto agreed loyally. ‘And some of the song lyrics were definitely out of the top layer of the chocolate box.’

  ‘They were all right, but it’s the performance that turns them into pure creamy éclair,’ said Whiffler dismissively.

  ‘What’s the name of the boddo who writes the lyrics, Frou-Frou?’ asked Blotto.

  ‘Everard Stoop,’ she replied. ‘He writes the sketches too. He’s frightfully clever.’

  ‘Vastly overrated,’ said Whiffler, unwilling to hear any other man praised by his beloved.

  Frou-Frou looked set to argue with this assertion, but their conversation was interrupted by the explosion into the room of the small bundle of energy that was Dolly Diller. She was out of her Light and Frothy costume, and into a pink silk dress that stopped vertiginously high above her white-stockinged knees. Blotto looked as though Christmas, his birthday and a massive win on a rank outsider in the Grand National had all happened on the same day.

  ‘’Ello, darlin’!’ screamed Dolly.

  ‘’Ello, darlin’!’ screamed Frou-Frou. ‘You know Whiffler, dontcha?’

  ‘Course I do.’ She slapped a darker red lipstick imprint on the red Old Etonian face. ‘You’re always coming back like a bad oyster, aintcher, Whiffles?’

  ‘And this is his friend . . . What did you say he was called?’

  ‘Devereux Lyminster, Frou-Frou. Younger brother of the Duke of Tawcester.’

  ‘Yes, but everyone calls me “Blotto”.’

  ‘Blotto? That’s a nice name,’ said Dolly, in a throaty voice which, had Blotto known the word, he would have recognised as ‘sexy’. ‘And fancy you being the brother of a Duke, and all.’

  He offered his hand. He’d rather have been offering his cheek to receive a smacker like the one Whiffler had got, but recognised that he didn’t yet know Dolly that well. She took the outstretched hand in both of hers, though, and shook it with encouraging warmth. He got the feeling she was a very warm person.

  ‘Nice name for a nice boy, eh?’ she susurrated. ‘You’re a looker, and no mistake, aintcher?’

  ‘Oh. Well. Thank you.’ Compliments always made Blotto feel rather embarrassed. Boldly, he ventured the opinion that: ‘You’re a bit of a bellbuzzer yourself, Dolly.’

  ‘Well, thank you, kind sir.’ She dropped a mock curtsey.

  ‘In fact,’ Blotto continued, with even greater daring, ‘you’re a real bellbuzzer with three veg and gravy.’

  ‘Ooh, you flatterer, you!’

  Blotto gaped at her, jaw sagging. Rarely had he been so quick in expressing his attraction for a woman. And the hasty effort had left his word-hoard severely depleted. He continued to gape.

  Then Giles ‘Whiffler’ Tortington had one of his rare but magnificent inspirations. ‘Great galumphing goatherds!’ he said. ‘Blotters and I were going to take Frou-Frou out for a scrimmick of dinner. Why don’t you join us, Dolly?’

  Blotto looked gratefully across at his friend. Old Etonians could always rely on their muffin-toasters. They were the sort of boddoes with whom one would voluntarily go into the jungle, a Hunt Ball, or any other dangerous environment. Blotto didn’t think he’d been so grateful since Whiffler had claimed responsibility for writing ‘Old Blaggers Eats Snails!’ on their French master’s blackboard (even though anyone could have recognised that the words were in Blotto’s handwriting). Among the right sort of people, noblesse still did very definitely oblige.

  ‘Ooh, wouldn’t I just love that?’ Dolly Diller gurgled.

  ‘Well, come on, Frou-Frou,’ said Whiffler. ‘Get out of the old peignoir and into some suitably totty togs, and we’ll be on our way!’

  * * *

  Dolly Diller stayed in the dressing room while her friend changed, but Blotto and Whiffler, who had, after all, been to public school and knew their etiquette, waited in the corridor outside.

  They had only been there a couple of minutes, when Twinks flashed by on the arm of the ravishing Jack Carmichael. ‘Going out for dinner, Blotto me old herring-gutter,’ she called over her shoulder. ‘See you at the Savvers in the morning!’

  ‘Tickey-Tockey,’ said her brother.

  He and Whiffler might have said more, had not a small man in a black suit, black shirt, black beret (and no tie!) at that moment walked past them, as if about to enter the dressing room. Whiffler interposed himself between man and door.

  ‘Excuse me, old greengage,’ he said, ‘but Frou-Frou Gavotte’s changing her togs in there.’

  ‘So?’ demanded the newcomer, in a voice that marked him out as that most unappealing of specimens, a Frenchman. ‘Girls’ bodies hold no surprises for me. Particularly the bodies of these particular girls. You see, I own every woman in Light and Frothy. They are all mine.’

  This was a bit much for Whiffler. ‘They are spoffing well not yours! At least, Frou-Frou certainly isn’t! And if you dare to claim that she is again, then I will ask you to step outside to settle the matter.’

  ‘Poo,’ said the man, in the way that only a Frenchman can say ‘Poo’. ‘How very English – you think you can settle every dispute with
a fight.’

  ‘Well, that approach didn’t turn out too shabbily for us at Agincourt,’ asserted Blotto.

  This prompted another ‘Poo’ from the Frenchman. ‘You clearly do not know who I am.’

  ‘I know,’ said Whiffler, ‘that you are an oikish louse with no respect for the fair sex – and, quite frankly, that’s all I need to know!’

  The Frenchman drew himself up to his full height, at which he almost reached Blotto and Whiffler’s second shirt studs. ‘My name is Pierre Labouze . . . the internationally known impresario. Light and Frothy is my latest creation. I have devised and put together the whole show. Light and Frothy is a Pierre Labouze production. So, when I say that I own all of the women in Light and Frothy, I am speaking no more than the truth.’

  ‘Listen, monsieur—’ began Whiffler, the rest of his face now redder than the lipstick mark Dolly Diller had placed on it.

  ‘No, you listen! I am not willing to be insulted in my own theatre by a . . .’ He paused to gather enough venom for the insult ‘. . . by a Stage-Door Johnny!’

  ‘I am not a Stage-Door Johnny,’ Whiffler responded with some dignity. ‘I am a Stage-Door Giles.’

  ‘I do not care. Whatever your name, you are an irrelevance!’

  Blotto had had enough. ‘Are you calling my friend an “irrelevance”?’

  ‘Yes,’ Pierre Labouze confirmed in a combative tone.

  ‘Well, I must ask you not to,’ said Blotto.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I don’t know what it means,’ he admitted.

  The argument might have progressed further, had not the dressing-room door at that point opened to reveal Frou-Frou Gavotte, now dressed in her evening finery, with Dolly Diller just behind her. The jaws of Whiffler and Blotto dropped in unison at their combined pulchritude.

  But their boss, the creator of Light and Frothy, was less than impressed. ‘Frou-Frou, you missed the beat in your Toe Tap Buck Break in “How Do You Get a Plumber in the Summer?” And, Dolly, in “Seaside Serenade”, you were slow on the cue. After Jack’s line, “I just seem to have lost my zing”, if you do not come in quickly with, “I just seem to have found mine”, the joke is lost. It did not even get a laugh tonight.’

  ‘It never gets a bloomin’ laugh,’ the soubrette came back combatively, ‘and that’s because it’s not a funny line.’

  ‘But it was written by Everard Stoop,’ Pierre Labouze protested, ‘and Everard Stoop is acknowledged to be the wittiest man in London.’

  ‘Yeah?’ said Dolly Diller. ‘I’ve heard wittier lines than his down a boozer in the Balls Pond Road.’

  ‘You cannot say that about Everard Stoop!’

  ‘I’ve just said it, so you can put that in your pipe and smoke it . . . Boozy.’

  ‘And I have told you a million times not to call me “Boozy”!’

  ‘Well, that’s a million and one now, isn’t it, Boozy? Oops, a million and two.’

  Blotto was greatly enjoying this exchange. He wasn’t quite sure, but he thought he probably liked a girl with spirit.

  ‘Dolly,’ snarled the impresario, ‘you are just a common slut!’

  ‘Now rein in the roans a moment there,’ said Blotto. ‘Don’t forget you’re talking to a lady.’

  ‘Lady? If that’s a lady, I’m a Dutchman.’

  ‘Well, you’re not a Dutchman,’ asserted Blotto, ‘but you still suffer the appalling disadvantage of not being British. You’re a Frenchman, which is an even worse kind of stencher.’

  ‘How dare you speak of my countrymen like that!’ His Gallic temperament flared. ‘You are speaking of the country of Napoleon.’

  ‘Tickey-Tockey,’ Blotto agreed. ‘But we’re speaking in the country of Wellington. And we all know how that particular ding-dong turned out, don’t we?’

  This caught the impresario on the raw. ‘Are you looking for a horsewhipping, monsieur?’

  ‘Why?’ asked Blotto, looming over his potential combatant. ‘Are you proposing to deliver one?’

  ‘Not. No personally. But I know people who could flay you to within a centimetre of your life.’

  Blotto looked confused. The Eton curriculum hadn’t covered the metric system.

  Frou-Frou and Dolly took advantage of the silence to say they thought they were meant to be going out to dinner.

  ‘Not until you have done what I demand of you!’ screamed Pierre Labouze. ‘I demand that you both come back onstage with me immediately, so that we can rehearse those moments in the show which tonight failed to come up to my high standards!’

  ‘And I demand,’ said Frou-Frou, with implacable Cockney determination, ‘that you stop getting your smalls in a spiral, and get out the way! We’re going out for dinner. See you in time for the show tomorrow.’

  With that, she and Dolly swept past the spluttering impresario, with two even more admiring swains in their wake. Blotto did not even bother to make a face at his vanquished opponent.

  Like a spoilt child – or like a Frenchman, which comes to much the same thing – Pierre Labouze stamped his little foot.

  The crowd of departing audience had thinned by the time they got to the front of the Pocket Theatre. Jack Carmichael had already whisked Twinks away in his Hispano-Suiza, and Corky Froggett was sitting patiently in the Lagonda, ready to spirit Blotto off in whatever direction he chose. Corky would have been equally happy, whether the destination proved to be the dry veldt of Africa, the snows of the Himalayas or the mountains of Peru. And if the journey took them into a warzone, where the opportunity arose for the chauffeur to kill a few people before laying down his life for the young master, then he would be even happier.

  There was one other car waiting in front of the Pocket Theatre, a black saloon with tinted windows. Beside it stood two men in black overcoats, with black hats pulled down over their eyes. Before Blotto had even had the opportunity to suggest they should all travel to their dinner destination in the Lagonda, the two men stepped forward, grabbed hold of Giles ‘Whiffler’ Tortington and bundled him into the back of the car.

  By the time Blotto had recovered from the shock of this sudden action, Whiffler and his abductors had disappeared into the dark streets of London.

  4

  Stratagems at the Savvers

  ‘So, what happened to you last night, Twinks me old button-hook?’

  ‘I had a very pleasant dinner, thank you, Blotto me old soup-strainer.’

  ‘With that hoofer boddo, Jim McMickle?’

  ‘Jack Carmichael, yes.’

  ‘And what time did you get back here to the Savvers?’

  Blotto felt a rare jolt of disapproval from his sister’s azure eyes. ‘Really, Blotters? You sound just like the Mater.’

  ‘Ouch! You know how to hurt a chap.’

  ‘Well, stop twitching your nostrils about what time I wheeled out the jim-jams.’

  ‘Sorry, sis.’

  ‘So you should be.’

  Blotto had been down to breakfast in the Savoy dining room before Twinks. When he’d taken his seat, he’d been manically desperate to tell her about the events of the previous evening, but the profusion of bacon, egg, sausages, kidneys, kippers, kedgeree and other delights in the silver dishes had distracted him. Though long on such sterling qualities as bravery, loyalty and honour, Blotto had always been a bit short on attention span.

  And it was only some time after Twinks had arrived and asked, ‘Did you have a splendiferous evening with the delectable Miss Diller?’ that he remembered he had a story to tell.

  By the end of his narration, all of the bacon, egg, sausages, kidneys, kippers, kedgeree and other delights on his plates had gone cold.

  ‘So, Blotto, you didn’t get your dinner à deux with Dolly?’

  ‘No. Though, mind you, it was never intended to be a dinner à deux. It was going to be a dinner à . . . à . . . à . . .’ He wished he’d listened more during his French lessons at Eton. ‘Dinner à four,’ he concluded feebly.

  ‘But, whate
ver it was going to be, you didn’t get to eat it?’

  ‘No. Apart from anything else, Frou-Frou was in absolute crimps about what had happened to Whiffler. Anyway, by the time the police had finished questioning us—’

  ‘Oh, don’t tell me you brought in the flatties!’ Twinks’s beautiful face wore a pale mask of disappointment. ‘I thought we had a sign-on-the-dotted about this, Blotters. We only bring in the bizz-bods when we’ve solved the case. Bringing them in early really is the flea’s armpit.’

  ‘I didn’t bring the stenchers in,’ Blotto protested. ‘It was the theatre manager. He’d pinged the telephonic instrument before I had a chance to stop him.’

  ‘Oh well,’ said Twinks, ‘let’s turn the cloud round and see the silver. If the flatties are already involved, then our challenge is to see that we nail the perps before they do. Which, of course we will do, as easy as raspberries.’

  Blotto looked dubious. For a moment, his internal barometer wavered towards ‘Changeable’. ‘Hold the hounds for a moment there, sis. I know back home we can wriggle rings around the local constabulary. Chief Inspector Trumbull and Sergeant Knatchbull are the world’s worst voidbrains.’ (Which some authorities might have considered a bit rich, given who was speaking.) ‘But here in London, we’re up against the cream of Scotland Yard. We haven’t got a candle’s chance in a cloudburst against them.’

  ‘Oh, Blotto, don’t talk such meringue. The cream of Scotland Yard are all clotted. We’ve got the brains to run them rippy.’

  ‘I think, actually, Twinks,’ said her brother with modest, but accurate, self-estimation, ‘you’ve got the brains to run them rippy.’

  ‘Don’t nit-pick noodles! We’re a team. We’re going to find out what’s happened to Whiffler, we’re going to rescue him. And, what’s more, we’re going to do it before the cream of Scotland Yard have finished tying up their bootlaces!’

  ‘Oh, Twinks,’ said Blotto, once again full of admiration. ‘You really are the panda’s panties.’ Then he added eagerly, ‘How are we going to do it?’