Jackpot Jack: A London Farce - страница 2

Beatrice stepped forward, her voice as sharp as her legal arguments. “Mr. Jack, it is, sadly, inevitable that you will shortly be departing. My mother, as you may or may not be aware, practically funds this country, and I, as her daughter, am a lawyer of exceptional repute. I trust you understand the gravity of the situation?”

Jack, who up until this point had been thicker than pea soup, finally caught a flicker of comprehension. “Oh,” he stammered, “Oh dear. I seem to have… misspoken.”

“Indeed, Mr. Jack,” Mrs. Honeywell said, her smile as sweet as poison. “You seem to have confused the Honeywells with a flock of docile sheep. Now, unless you wish to be devoured by this family, I suggest you make a hasty retreat.”

And so Jack, like a coward running from a ghost, fled into the night, leaving the Honeywells to their formidable, and utterly un-domesticated, lives. He learned, or at least, should have learned, that the surest way to make a fool of oneself is to underestimate the ladies.

Jack, poor sap, was a frightful mess. He looked like a badly packed portmanteau, all wrinkles and bulging seams of shame. He'd made a right hash of things with the Honeywells. A family of formidable women, each one sharper than a tack, each one more successful than the last, and he'd dared to suggest that a woman's place was in the home, minding the sprogs. The Honeywells, naturally, had treated him like a particularly irritating bluebottle. He'd fled, tail between his legs, conviction in tatters. Now, slumped in Mike's frankly rather uncomfortable armchair, he looked like a man who'd lost a bet with a particularly tenacious badger.

“Mike,” he sighed, his voice a mournful foghorn, “I've made a blunder of epic proportions! Utterly, completely, irrevocably…”

“Messed up, have we, Jack?” Mike offered, ever the master of understatement.

“Messed up? My dear fellow, I've single-handedly set back the cause of male superiority by at least a century! The Honeywells…they're a force of nature, Mike, a whole blooming Amazonian rainforest of intellect! They’re all…brunettes.”

Jack fixed Mike with a look of profound, yet utterly misplaced, understanding. “That's it, you see! The brunettes! They’re the clever ones. Always have been. The Honeywells, they run businesses, write books, probably build rockets in their spare time! It's obvious! Brunettes are for doing, for achieving, for conquering the world. Blondes, now they're different kettle of fish. Blondes are home bodies. Domestic goddesses,” he declared, with the air of a man unveiling the secrets of the universe. “Blondes are for baking cakes and producing little cherubs.”