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If there’s one thing people say about the ol’ Wooster clan, it’s that we’re always hot to support a friend in their enterprises. Sometimes, it’s true, we’ve been known to support them to the tune of losing a dashed lot of moolah in the crash of 1929. But us modern Woosters are a bit more even in the keel department. I do know these little start-ups and pop-ups and crypto flutters will go pear-shaped from time to time, it’s simply one of the rules of the grand old world known as business. Anytime a pal of mine touches me for an investment, I call it a gift, and if I get a little money back, it’s a jolly nice surprise. But if I don’t, then I don’t, and I refuse to hold it against the chap, or chappess, or whatever our nonbinary friends ought to be called. Say, there’s an idea—
~~~
“Jeeves!” I call out, in the general direction of the kitchen. “What are Chappell Roan’s pronouns?”
“Last I was aware, they are she/her, sir,” comes the ever-erudite reply. Drat. Not a chappell, then. I’ll file that question for later.
~~~
Anyway, there’s a good pal of mine called Boko Fittleworth. Capital fellow, a pukka sahib, and an inventive dresser to boot. Jeeves finds him distressin’ to look upon, not being a fan of the Assemblée Générale, or do I mean the avant-garde? One of those topping French terms. Dear old Boko has beaucoup social engagements these days, ever since he formed a polycule with Nobby Hopwood and Ginger Winship, and his on-again, off-again metamour Magnolia Glendennon. The four of them are always going on dates with each other, and other people, and trying to set one another up with even more dates. It’s a web that spans the Greater London Authority and threatens to expand into Hampshire any day now.
So natch Boko and Magnolia have launched a new dating app, and he’s keen for the whole Drones Club to try it out. I wish he’d asked me for readies instead. Bertram Wooster is not on the apps. I know enough people already. Between Malvern House Prep, Eton, and Magdalen, I arrived at adulthood bursting at the seams with friends, and since then I’ve been introduced to such a dim sum menu of pals of pals, folks my aunts and uncles have cultivated, and various people’s weird boyfriends (declension neutrum, but it is usually boys, innit?) that the address book in my cranium is full up. No more, it weeps, there is no room at the inn!
So I told Boko, but it was a no-go. He didn’t need money, he needed people to populate the darned thing with profiles, and we were at school together, so yours truly had no choice. I did that thingummy that the beast that didn’t want to go to the place in the poem did…
~~~
“Jeeves, what’s the poem about the something something beast going thence to be born?”
“I believe sir is referring to the William Butler Yeats poem ‘The Second Coming.’ ‘And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?’”
“That’s the ticket, Jeeves. It’s always a privilege to hear you recite.”
~~~
Like a rough beast, I slouched towards the Reading Room in hopes of finding a quiet-ish corner to knead the grey matter. I plonked the Wooster bottom into an Eames chair by the window, only to be descended upon by the veriest egg, bean, and crumpet combination of Gussie Fink-Nottle, Bingo Little, and Tuppy Glossop. They were all working on their profiles too.
Well, they made me go through my camera roll and choose the plummiest photos of myself looking like a proper snack, and they took my phone away altogether for a bit and filled the profile with a lot of twaddle about my hobbies and desires in life, and I’ll say this much for the experience—at least one’s best mates really are the ones who know one best, what? I rather admired the finished profile as a digital objet d’art.
And that, I thought, was the end of that. Having discharged my duty as a friend, I asked Jeeves to suppress the app’s notifications and thought no more of it.
What I failed to consider is just how well Boko and Magnolia know their stuff. They launched this app just in time for Pride month. Well, dear Angela Travers was on the organizin’ committee for an LGBTQIA+ Picnic Soiree. I might not have bothered with it if she wasn’t involved. It was the same night Taskmaster comes on. But Angela and I have been great chums ever since we were little kids, and unlike Boko, she does hesitate to drag her friends in her riotous wake. Just look at how long it took her to inform her pater of the embarrassin’ mistake that had been made in sending Angela to an all boys' school, when she’d been a girl the whole time. That’s a gal with excess consideration for others, and no mistake. So I like to go the extra mile for Angela. We were even engaged for a time, much to Jeeves’s dismay. Oh, he thinks the world of little Angela, don’t get me wrong. He just hates it when I get engaged. Dreads the prospect of changes to the domestic sphere, don’cha know.
On the night of the picnic, I said to Jeeves, “Was it Jean-Paul Sartre who said ‘To read a poem in January is as lovely as to go for a walk in June’?”
“It certainly was, sir!” he told me, with a suspicion of surprise in his voice. Let that be a lesson to you that Jeeves isn’t the only one who can wangle an apt quotation about!
“Tally-ho, Jeeves!” I declared. So we had a lovely walk over to the picnic.
It was a boisterous affair already by the time we arrived, and it seemed everyone there was a proper bobby dazzler, turned out with proper swag and rizz. I was a little disappointed that Jeeves had used his veto on my first choice of ‘fit. I’d purchased a spiffing t-shirt with ants printed all over it, and I wanted to wear it with denim cut-off shorts and red-and-white checkered canvas tennis shoes. “It’s camp, Jeeves!” I protested, but he was shuddering and muttering like that child in The Exorcist, if it is The Exorcist I’m thinking of, so I gave in and wore our willow-green suit that Jeeves bought me for the Royal Ascot, and a cream collarless shirt. He did let me wear a delightful fuschia bandana around my neck, Jeeves isn’t what you might call a fun-hater.
“It’s an homage,” he informed me, “to the hanky code.”
“Brill. What am I flagging?”
“You’re not, sir.” So I reckoned the pocket bit is pretty important, and didn’t worry about it.
There we were, chowing down on chicken tikka masala pizza and strawberry-peach smoothies from the hamper Jeeves had prepared. We were sharing our blankets with a rotating cast of mates, as these informal events tend to go. I think at the special moment worth recollectin’, we had Gussie, plus Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright, Madeline Bassett, and Ginger Winship.
Well, Gussie’s phone kept making irritatin’ pling-pling noises, and then he would ignore everyone for a moment to text someone and smile in a foolish sort of way. I suspected awfully that Gussie was once again in lurve. I was on the verge of asking for the deets on the good banter, when Gussie let out a sort of gasping shriek, like a Canadian loon whanging away on a slide whistle, and dropped his phone.
Naturally, we all looked upon him with a hairy eyeball of censure, this not being the done thing in a crowd. Gussie turned the color of Warhol’s favorite soup. He spilled the whole story: He’d been texting with some bloke he’d met on this blamed app—not that I called it that at the time, not wanting to offend Ginger with my opinion on the brainchild of his live-in lover (Boko) and fiancee (Magnolia). Gussie and Mr. Right had hit it off splendidly. They were interested in the same books, they wanted to meet up for a dreary-making molecular gastro experience with tiny plates of food, and the fellow even seemed tolerant of Gussie’s passion for newts.
“And I left him a voice-mail earlier to say we should exchange photos of newts!”
Jeeves broke in, “Augustus, did you say ‘photos of newts,’ or did you, by chance, say, ‘newt photos?’”
Well, Jeeves must have caught the way the wind was blowing, but I didn’t see what he was drivin’ at, and neither did Gussie. The long and short of it was that the man had sent Gussie an array of nude photos.
Gussie passed the phone to me. “Oh, golly gosh!” I said, scrolling through. Jeeves and Catsmeat leaned over my shoulders to see the whole show. And believe you me, there was a lot to see. I didn’t know God made any of His creatures on those proportions.
“Ahh, hmm,” said Jeeves.
“If you don’t want him, I do,” said Catsmeat, and pulled out his own phone to try to find the blighter on the app. His profile photos were all of his bare muscular chest, and his artistically half-covered arse. He had a tattoo of the Oxford rugby logo thereabouts. Nothing at all of his face. I didn’t realize at the time that was dodgy to those who grok the scene.
Poor Gussie, he didn’t know what he wanted. On the one hand, he had Catsmeat licking his chops to steal Mr. Right away, and on the other, he had Madeline, loudly decrying the decay of romance in modern dating. He took his phone back, tentatively typed, Actually I meant newt photos. and sent the message off without getting us to audit it first. Like a Greek chorus line, we tried to arrive at a suitable way to say he was still interested in the gastro whatsit and all that, but lo and behold, the fellow texted back Soz and unmatched him!
I was mightily unimpressed.
The next time the app struck out at the hearts of decent folk was at Oofy Prosser’s annual costume ball to benefit the National AIDS Trust.
The theme this year was “Crossdressing,” which caused Jeeves no end of bally hard work. The ladies’ line ain’t his area of expertise, you understand. He bowled a corker in the end, and we both looked mad leng. He had a black and white gown with tuxedo styling and a flower-trimmed top hat, and he put me in a divine blue frock with a white fur wrap. It had been yonks since I wore my tiara, and I’d say we gave it a jolly good airing.
Well, Gwladys Pendlebury and Florence Craye turned up wearing matching sailor suits and besotted expressions. They had just U-hauled it, as the Americans say, to a twee canal boat for two, and were in a twenty-four sev kissy face many-splendored thing. It brought a touching tear to the Wooster eye.
Gwladys and I were having a grand old chinwag sesh by the hors d'oeuvres about her art or some suchlike thing, when her phone went off: pling-pling. She ignored it. But wouldn’t you know it, the darned thing kept a-chimin’. When Florence came back with a Bucks Fizz for the apple of her eye, the Gwladys’s phone blew up with several notifs in smartish succession. Gwladys made a helpless shrugging gesture, having one hand occupied with the cocktail glass and the other with one of Oofy’s lead crystal canape plates.
With an indulgent chuckle, Florence reached into Gwladys’s trouser pocket and whipped out her girlfriend’s phone. She entered Gwladys’s passcode without a second’s hesitation, and angled the screen so they could both see.
That put the fox among the cockles of Florence’s heart. The upshot of the down low is that the little jingles were from that app of Boko and Mags’s. Florence exclaimed that Gwladys was cheating on her. Gwladys swore up, down, and diagonally that she only signed up as a favor to Magnolia, and she wasn’t actually using the thing. Florence clapped back with a valid-ish point that Gwladys could have taken it off her phone if that were the case, and Gwladys retorted that Florence had no right to make accusations in front of their friends, and Florence wept that anyone who would try to help Gwladys cheat was no friend of Florence’s.
She tapped through the messages from Gwladys’s amorous hopefuls and used (Jeeves explained to me) a proximity doohickey in the app to work out which of them were at the party right then. And sooner than one could say “boo” to a goose, she was off and moving like Sir Mo Farrah, running about Oofy’s house to find these women and confront them. We trailed behind to see what would happen—Gwladys, Jeeves, and me—and I did try to calm Gwladys down by saying Florence just needed to get it out of her system, but Gwladys just complained it was this sort of inane comment that led her to break our engagement.
Anyway, the various ladies kept saying, no, they were not ashamed of themselves, how were they to know? And yes, they did find Gwladys a frightfully handsome girl, congratulations on winning her hand and whatnot. I could see that Florence was going from irate to downright chipper. She was proud of pulling a Venus of popular opinion. Before you knew it, she and Gwladys were snogging, and then they were apologizing to the ladies from the app, and then the whole lot of them tottered off to have a Sapphic orgy on the canal boat.
All’s well that ends well, they say, but it was mighty stressful as it was happening. The night concierge of the building of flats Jeeves and I reside in said some of our neighbors complained of the noise, us being so close to the stretch of river the happy couple and their company were moored on. I can’t say I noticed it myself. The blasted zip of my gown broke while Jeeves was helping me out of it, and he was nigh-on inconsolable.
There was still the problem of Gussie’s broken heart, and I don’t mind telling you it was preying on my mind. I don’t like to see a chum down, and he’s one of my chummiest. He called me up one day, as Pride events were winding down, to ask if Jeeves and I would be going to Bingo’s DJ set at that queer club across from the Drones Club that I can never remember the name of. We weren’t going, between you and me. Jeeves and I prefer jazz. Jeeves had mysterious business of his own in the City, and I was chilling on my own, giving myself a mani-pedi in Blushin’ Pride.
As you can guess by now, I agreed to turn up.
I was pushin’ my way through the catsup-thick crowd, looking for Gussie’s forlorn and lonesome form, when a chap turned a high-beam smile on me and said, “Hey! I just saw you on that new app—can I buy you a drink?”
I was about to say that wasn’t likely, but then I remembered I am, in fact, on that blighted app, and what came out of my mouth was, “Oh, yes…” and then he was buying the drink, so I felt the only polite thing to do was hang about and have bevvies with him.
He was certainly pleasant, and all that, and he was rather a good-looking cove. But I felt dashed awkward. I mean, the fellow was a commercial diver! I don’t want you thinking, ooh, that Bertie Wooster, he’s a rare bird, he can only talk with people who went to Eton. I’ll have you know many of my friends went to the less competitive public schools, some of them even on scholarships. And, you know, King Charles himself didn’t go to Eton, so anyone with half a brain knows it’s not the be-all end-all! Plenty of the Drones have jobs. But blimey, I do feel like a little fawn in the woods when I encounter a rugged son of the land like that. Ooh-la-la, but what does one say?
Turns out I didn’t have to say much, because Jeeves turned up. He gave me a most disapproving look up and down. This was because without him to dress me, I had put on the cut-off denim shorts with a tight Breton shirt, a beret, Roman sandals, and a single long earring with an enamel gin and tonic charm dangling from it.
“I don’t recognize some of those…shall we call them garments, sir?”
“You don’t know everything I get up to, Jeeves,” I riposted with a certain amount of satisfaction.
“It is of eternal concern to me that I must occasionally leave you unsupervised, sir.”
“I feel it adds an essential zest to your life to catch you off guard, Jeeves.”
After giving me a pained expression, he turned to introduce himself to the commercial diver. “Hi, I’m Reggie. Sorry to interrupt your conversation. I just need to borrow Mr. Wooster. Immediately.”
“Oh,” said the commercial diver. “Sorry, I didn’t realize. You’re, what, boyfriends? Husbands? Are you looking to hook up together, or is it just Bertie?”
Jeeves and I exchanged a look of mutual shock. “He’s my valet,” I said.
“Your what?”
“Valet. You know, it’s a bit like a butler.” You’ll forgive the simplification, I’m sure, reader. I don’t know how much they teach about these matters at free schools.
The commercial diver appeared to turn this over in his head. “Like, a kink thing? You’re lifestylers, is that it?”
You see what I mean? How to make the chap understand? I don’t like to be a snob, but there are some things that yet divide us in these loose and egalitarian times. I said something hasty about needing to feed the cat, even though we haven’t got one, and let Jeeves haul me to another side of the room.
“I need you,” whispered Jeeves into my shell-like, “to stay with Augustus so he doesn’t leave too early.”
“But I haven’t found Gussie—oh. Hello, Gussie! How are you bearing up?” The poor chap looked miserable, like a lobster that knows it’s thermidor night.
“My newts are getting me through it, Bertie,” he said dejectedly, which was a bad sign. I mean, I know Gussie loves his newts, but you ought to have more than newts to fall back on, even so.
I turned back to Jeeves and whispered in his ear, “How am I supposed to know when it’s not too early anymore?”
“Trust me, you’ll know.” And with that, he melted into the crowd.
Well, I tried to cheer Gussie up with a spot of dancing, by suggesting we start out with the newt mating dance Oofy made a TikTok trend out of after Gussie showed it to him. Gussie gave it the old college try, purely for Bingo’s sake, you understand. He wanted our pal’s DJ punt to go off well as much as I.
There we were, our attention on the DJ stand, when a great strapping fellow hopped up onto one of the unoccupied go-go dancer podiums and cried out, “Gussie!”
And Gussie went, “I don’t know your name!” rather uncertainly, but I had recognized that big Newfoundland puppy of a lad at once. He might not have met Gussie in the wild before, but he was a mate of mine—we were at Oxford together.
“Stinker!” I cried out. Stinker Pinker did not acknowledge this.
“Gussie, it’s me!” Stinker pressed on. To illustrate his point, he turned his back and lowered his trousers just enough to display a tattoo above his arse of the Oxford rugby logo.
“Mr. Right?!” Gussie exclaimed. He pressed his hands to his heart, looking rather like the painting by someone of the gal clutching flowers to her chest.
~~~
I lift my voice, rather too loudly, as Jeeves has just come out of the kitchen and is rather close: “Jeeves, do you know the one I mean?”
“I thought myself at the time that Augustus rather resembled the Sophie Gengembre Anderson painting Love in a Mist, sir.”
“Cracking. You’ve always got your finger on the pulse and in the pie, Jeeves.”
“Sir is most generous.”
~~~
At any rate, there was Gussie, overcome with a hot pot of emotions, and there was Stinker, desperate to see his reaction. Stinker Pinker being the fellow that he is, which is to say, constitutionally incapable of walking through the great Gobi desert without knocking something over, he attempted to whirl around, but only succeeded in dropping trou and pants down to his ankles, losing his balance, and falling clear off the podium. Jeeves and I made a grab for him, and we were by and large successful in sparing him from any serious injury.
There was nothing we could do, however, to protect Stinker’s modesty until we had him safely on the ground. The whole, you might say, meat and two veg were on full display. Gussie seemed rather moved by the sight. He knelt at Stinker’s side and covered him with a charmin’ souvenir rainbow beanie hat. He took Stinker’s hand in his, pressing it romantically, and demanded, “Why did you unmatch me?”
“I didn’t,” Stinker said wretchedly. “I was so ashamed, I deleted my whole account. I’m sorry, Gussie, I didn’t mean to send you unsolicited dick pics.”
And then there was a lot of mushy chit-chat about Gussie not really minding at all, and the resumption of their plans for a high-brow dinner and all that. We popped them into a cab and headed into the hot and quiet night, looking at rainbow lights on festive display.
“Say, Jeeves,” I praised, “that was mighty clever of you to remember old Stinker Pinker’s tattoo.”
“Thank you, sir. I’m sure there are a number of men in London with mementos of Oxford rugby on their skin, but what is so vulgarly called a ‘tramp stamp’ is distinctive. This, coupled with his reluctance to show his face in his profile, gave me a solid hunch to pursue.”
“I see,” I said, even though I didn’t. “Why was that, then? About the face? I mean, he doesn’t resemble a fish or a horse or anything unfortunate from the kingdom of animals.”
“Your friend Harold Pinker is the Reverend Pinker, you may recall, sir.”
“Well, yes.”
“He felt a certain delicacy about the risk of being recognized by a parishioner, sir.”
“Ah. Jolly good work, Jeeves. I think I’m going to delete my profile off that app, you know. Seems to be causing no end of trouble, and I wouldn’t say old Boko and Magnolia need my help anymore.”
“No, sir?”
“No. They’re saying it’s the new Grindr, Jeeves.”
“Indeed? I wasn’t aware anything had befallen the old Grindr.”
“Such is life and commerce under city lights, Jeeves. You’re up, you’re down, you’re nude in public. Let’s call it a night.”
So Jeeves and I went home, fooled around on the piano for a while, and went to bed.