If I can’t have her, no one else will.
I imagine this is one of the thoughts passing through Mr Eresby’s mind at this very moment. Mr Eresby, you see, is in the grip of considerable mental turmoil – what I believe alienists term ‘unrelieved anguish’. Mr Eresby’s hands are clenched into fists. He keeps shaking his head. His shoulders are hunched forward. His movement can only be described as ‘jerky’.
I am walking some distance behind him. I have been following Mr Eresby for the past – let me see – ten, no, twelve, minutes.
Left, right, left, right. Though all I am presented with is the back of Mr Eresby’s head, I am sure his expression is still dazed, the corners of his mouth pulled down, his complexion exceedingly pale, his eyes ‘unseeing’. They say exercise has a beneficial effect on the nervous system, but, in my opinion, it is too soon for any tangible changes for the better to have started manifesting themselves.
The situation is incomprehensible and, frankly, quite absurd. Mr Eresby (‘Charlie’ to his intimates) is young, rich and handsome and he can have any girl he wants; yet it is Olga Klimt on whom he has set his heart. No other girl will do. He says he can’t live without her. He says, rather extravagantly, that he’d rather die. I read somewhere that emotional problems of such extreme nature invariably go back to one’s childhood and have something to do with one’s relations with one’s parents. I wonder if that is true.
Mr Eresby’s papa, of Eresby’s Biscuits fame and fortune, has been dead twenty-two years, so Mr Eresby has no recollection of him, though his mama is still very much with us. She is a very interesting woman, ‘unconventional’, perhaps is the best word to describe her, and she cares deeply for Mr Eresby, even if she tends to treat him as though he were a boy of ten. Maybethat’s the problem? Perhaps at this point I should mention that relations between me and the former Mrs Eresby – Lady Collingwood, as she now is – are excellent. Lady Collingwood regards me in a most favourable light. Indeed she thinks, if I may be excused the cliché, the world of me. She is convinced that I am an exceptional, if not unique, human being. Well, she is right. Iam unique.
It is thanks to Lady Collingwood that I obtained my position with Mr Eresby. Lady Collingwood telephones me once a week and we have a ‘chat’. She listens carefully to what I have to say. My opinions matter to her. It pains me that Lord Collingwood does not seem to share the high regard in which his wife holds me. Apparently Lord Collingwood has expressed concern about the influence I exercise over her and on two occasions at least has referred to me, somewhat fancifully, as playing Rasputin to Lady Collingwood’s Russian Empress. He has also said I am ‘the sort of fellow who should be tarred and feathered or, failing that, flung over a precipice’.
I would have preferred to have had my specialness confirmed, not deprecated, and having pondered the matter, I have reached the conclusion that Lord Collingwood should be punished. Not at the
