The Mortdecai Trilogy (10 page)

‘No no no,’ I said again, wriggling with embarrassment, ‘nothing of the sort. Rotten shot. I’m only a nobleman and my brother bagged the only title: my father sort of dropped me a courtesy, ha ha.’ He looked puzzled and distressed so I tried to explain.

‘England isn’t like the Continent, you see, nor even like Scotland in this respect. The
seize quartiers
“noble in all his branches” thing is something we don’t like to talk about and there aren’t half a dozen families with straight descent from a knight of the Conquest, I should think – and they aren’t titled. Anyway,’ I rambled on, ‘no one in his senses would want to be descended from one of that lot: the Conquest was something between a joint-stock company and a Yukon gold-rush; William the Conk himself was a sort of primitive Cecil Roberts and his followers were bums, chancers, queers and comic singers.’

He was boggling beautifully now, so I couldn’t resist going on.

‘Broadly speaking, practically none of the aristocracy are peers today and very few of the peers are aristocrats by any standard which would be taken seriously on the Continent: most of them are lucky if they can trace their family back to some hard-faced oick who did well out of the Dissolution of the Monasteries.’

This really upset him; one end of his concertina of printouts escaped from his lap and cascaded on to the floor between our feet. We both stooped for it but I, being thinner than he by an inch or two, stooped lower, so that our heads did not actually ring together; but my nose (Norman, with Roman remains) found itself half inside his jacket and practically nuzzling the black butt of an automatic pistol in a shoulder clip.

‘Ooops!’ I squeaked, quite unnerved. He chuckled kindly, fatly.

‘Don’t you give that iron no never-mind, son; why, we Texans feel kind of undressed without one of them things.’

We chattered on in a desultory way but I found it hard to concentrate on the prettier points of fish-frying. Texas businessmen doubtless often carry pistols but I found it hard to believe that they would favour the inconvenient length of a Colt’s Woodsman, which is a small calibre, long-barrelled automatic used only for target shooting and, more rarely, by professional killers who know they can plant its small bullet in just the right place. As a handy weapon of self-defence for the ordinary citizen it simply doesn’t exist. Moreover, Texas businessmen, I felt sure, would be unlikely to house their pistols in Bryson rapid-release spring-clips.

The journey seemed to get longer all the time, if you follow me. The United States seemed distant and undeskable. As we landed the nice American finally told me his name – Brown, spelt b.r.a.u.n, pronounced Brawn. ‘A likely story,’ I thought. We farewelled and, a moment after we left the plane, he vanished. Once his warm and portly presence was gone I found I liked him less and less.

Martland had fulfilled my list of instructions faithfully – he would make someone a lovely wife. There was a big sad chap to meet me who guided me to an echoing bay where the Rolls stood and shimmered on its pallet, surrounded by other chaps with dear little petrol tankers, exotic licence plates, books of travellers’ cheques and I don’t know what-all. Oh yes, and a grave chap who struck my passport savagely with a rubber stamp. I accepted all their offerings with a weary courtesy, like a Crowned Head receiving specimens
of native handicraft. There was also a furious little mannikin from the British Embassy but he was on the other side of a sort of pig-wire barrier – he had neglected to get the right sort of pass or something and the big, impassive Americans ignored his squeakings and gibberings completely, as did I. The chap with the petrol tanker wrenched the necessary lead seals off with pliers and tossed them through the wire to the squeaking chap as one throws peanuts to a zoo-bound ape, making vulgar clicking noises with his tongue and pretending to scratch his armpits. I began to fear for his health – the squeaking chap I mean, not the petrol chap.

I mounted the Rolls, sucking my lungs full of that unparalleled smell of new coachwork, new hide upholstery. The big sad chap, knowing his place, stood on the running-board to guide me out. The Rolls started up gently, gladly, like a well-goosed widow, and we drifted out of the Goods Area making about as much noise as a goldfish in a bowl. I could tell by the looks on their rough, untutored American faces that, had they been brought up in another culture, they would have been knuckling their foreheads. As a mark of respect, d’you see.

At the exit we were met by the chap from the Embassy, still squeaking and now well-nigh self-strangled with rage and chagrin. Had he been brought up in another culture he would probably have knuckled
my
forehead to some purpose. I reasoned with him, begging him to be a credit to the Corps Diplomatique, and he at last rallied. What it all boiled down to was that the Ambassador was at some Xanadu-like golf links far away, playing golf or rounders or something with one of their Presidents or Congressmen or whatever they are, but that he would be back in the morning, when I must report to him, shit or bust and cap in hand, to receive his admonitions and surrender my Greyhound and that he, the squeaker, demanded to know the name of the
bloody
man who had dared to tamper with the leaden Foreign Office seals on the Rolls. I told him that the chap’s name was McMurdo (for the spur of the moment not bad, you must agree) and promised to try to find time to call on the Ambassador perhaps during the next few days.

He started getting incoherent again and kept beginning sentences with the words ‘Do you realize …’ and not finishing them, so I set my face against him.

‘Pull yourself together,’ I told him sternly, pressing a pound note into his hand. As I drove away I caught a glimpse of him in the driving mirror; he was jumping up and down on something. Too emotional by half, some of these diplomatic chaps. He’d be no good in Moscow, they’d have him compromised in a trice.

I found my hotel and handed over the Rolls to an able-looking brownish chap in the garage: he had a witty twinkle in his eye, I took to him instantly. We agreed that he could use only the duster on the coachwork and nothing else: Mr Spinoza would have
haunted
me if I’d let his Special Secret Wax be scoured with detergents or ossified with silicones. Then I rode the elevator – as they say over there, did you know? – up to the reception desk (my bags with me) and so by easy stages to a well-appointed suite with a lavatory worthy of the goddess Cloaca herself. Like a true-born Englishman I turned the ridiculous air conditioning off and threw open the windows.

Fifteen minutes later I turned the air conditioning back on and had to telephone the desk to send someone up to close the windows for me, oh the shame of it.

Later on they sent me up some sandwiches which I didn’t much like.

Later still I read myself to sleep with one half-comprehended paragraph.

Does he stand stock-still henceforth? Or proceed
Dizzily, yet with course straightforward still,
Down-trampling vulgar hindrance? – as the reed
Is crushed beneath its tramp when that blind will
Hatched in some old-world beast’s brain bids it speed
Where the sun wants brute-presence to fulfil
Life’s purpose in a new far zone, ere ice
Enwomb the pasture-track its fortalice.

 

The Two Poets of Croisic

 

Do you know, they brought me a cup of tea in the morning – and jolly good tea it was too. If I could remember the name of the hotel I’d tell you.

Then they gave me one of those delicious elaborate American breakfasts, all sweet bacon and hotcakes and syrup and I didn’t like it really.

I rode the elevator (!) down to the garage to inquire after the Rolls which had, it seemed, passed a comfortable night. The brownish chap hadn’t been able to resist washing the windows but only with soap and water, he swore, so I pardoned him and gave him of my plenty. Ten minutes later I was in an enormous taxi-cab, an air-conditioned one, hired for the day for fifty dollars; it seems an awful lot, I know, but money’s worth awfully little over there, you’d be surprised. It’s because there’s so much of it, you see.

The driver’s name seemed to be Bud and somehow he’d got the notion that mine was Mac. I explained amicably that it was, in fact, Charlie, but he replied:

‘Yeah? Well, that’s very nice, Mac.’

I didn’t mind after a while – I mean, when in
Rome
, eh? – and soon he was driving me round the sights of Washington, sparing nothing. It is a surprisingly splendid and graceful city, although built largely of a grotty kind of limestone; I loved every minute. The great heat was tempered by an agreeable little breeze which whipped the girls’ cotton frocks about in the most pleasing way. How is it that American girls all contrive to have such appetizing legs; round, smooth, sturdily slender? If it comes to that, how is it that they all have such amazing tits? Bigger, perhaps, than you and I like them, but nonetheless delicious. When we stopped for a traffic light, a particularly well-nourished young person crossed in front of us, her stupendous mammaries jouncing up and down quite four inches at each step.

‘My word, Bud,’ I said to Bud, ‘what an entrancing creature, to be sure!’

‘Ya mean de dame wit de big knockers? Nah. In bed, they’d kinda spread out like a coupla fried eggs, king-size.’

The thought made me feel quite faint. He went on to give me a summary of his personal tastes in these matters, which I found fascinating but
bizarre
to a degree.

It has been suggested, with some truth, that Van Dyck’s work when he was at Genoa constitutes the best group of portraits in the world. I came round to this point of view myself in the National Gallery at Washington: until you have seen their
Clelia Cattaneo
you can scarcely claim to have seen anything. I stayed an hour only in the Gallery: you can’t absorb much art of that richness at one sitting, and I’d really only intended to look at one particular Giorgione. Had I but time as this fell sergeant Death is swift in his arrest, I could have unfolded a tale or two about it, but that shot is no longer on the board.

Emerging, already half drunk on injudiciously mixed art, I directed Bud to drive me to a typical lower-middle-class saloon for a cold beer and a bite of luncheon.

At the entrance Bud looked at me dubiously, up and down, and suggested that we try somewhere ‘classier’.

‘Nonsense, my dear Bud,’ I cried staunchly, ‘this is the normal, sober garb or kit of an English gentleman of fashion about to pay a call on his country’s Envoy
in partibus
and I am sure it is well-known to these honest Washington folk. In Sir Toby’s valiant words: “These clothes are good enough to drink in, and so be these boots, too.” Lead on.’

He shrugged, in the expressive way these chaps have, and led duly on. He was very big and strong-looking but people nevertheless stared a little – he was dressed a bit informally perhaps, as cabbies often are, while I, as I have said, was correctly clothed as for interviewing ambassadors, merchant bankers and other grandees. In England no one would have remarked the contrast between us but they have no idea of democracy in America. Odd, that.

We ate in a sort of stall or booth, rather like the old-fashioned London chop house but flimsier. My steak was quite lovely but embarrassingly large: it seemed to be a cross-section through an ox. I had a salad with mine but Bud ordered a potato –
such
a potato; a prodigious tuber bred, he told me, on the plains of Idaho. I suppose I left about ten ounces of my steak and Bud quite coolly told the waiter (
his
name was Mac, too) to wrap it up for his dog and the waiter didn’t even flicker although they both knew quite well that it would constitute Mrs Bud’s supper that night. Steak is fearfully dear in Washington, as I daresay you know.

Bud may have licked me at the steak eating but I had him whipped at the liquor drinking. They have something there called, obscurely, High Balls, which we moved on to after our beer; he was no match for me at that game, quite outclassed. He eyed me, in fact, with a new respect. I believe I asked him to come and stay with me in London at one stage; at least I know I meant to.

As we left the bar a rather droll-looking citizen swayed across my path and asked, ‘Whaddaya, some kinova nut or sumpn?’ to which I replied in a matey phrase which I had heard Bud use to a fellow cabbie earlier in the day, as follows:

‘Ah, go blow it out your ass!’ (
A man hath joy by the answer of his mouth; and a word spoken in due season, how good it is!
Prov. XV: 23.)

To my dismay and puzzlement, the drunk chap took exception, for he hit me very hard in the face, making my nose bleed freely down my shirt. Vexed at this, I fear I retaliated.

When I was in one of those joke-and-dagger units in the war – yes, the
Second
World War, chicks – I went on one of those unarmed combat courses and, do you know, I was frightfully good at it, though you wouldn’t think it to look at me.

I popped the heel of my hand under his nose –
so
much better than a punch – then toed him hard in the cobblers and, as he quite understandably doubled up, drove my knee into what was left of his poor face. He sort of fell down, not unnaturally in the circumstances, and as a precaution I stamped on each of his hands as I stepped over him. Well, he did hit me first, you know, as I’m sure he’d be the first to admit. Bud,
enormously
impressed, hustled me outside while the saloon behind us applauded – pit, circle and gallery. An unpopular bloke, no doubt. I had very little trouble getting into the cab, although the driver’s seat had changed sides again.

All the beautiful young men at the Embassy hated me on sight, nasty little cupcakes, but they passed me through to the Ambassador with no more delay than was necessary to make them feel important. The Ambassador received me in his shirt sleeves, if you’ll believe it, and he, too, didn’t seem to fancy me much. He accepted my courtly, old-world salutations with what I can only describe as a honk.

Now, for most practical purposes the ordinary consumer can divide Ambassadors up into two classes: the thin ones who tend to be suave, well-bred, affable; and the fleshier chaps who are none of these things. His present Excellency definitely fell into the latter grade: his ample mush was pleated with fat, wormed with the great pox and so besprent with whelks, bubukles and burst capillaries that it seemed like a contour map of the Trossachs. His great plum-coloured gobbler hung slack and he sprayed one when he spoke. I couldn’t find it in my heart to love him but, poor chap, he was probably a Labour appointment: his corridors of power led only to the Gents.

‘I won’t beat about the bush, Mortdecai,’ he honked, ‘you are clearly an awful man. Here we are, trying to establish an image of a white-hot technological Britain, ready to compete on modern terms with any jet-age country in the world and here
you
are, walking about Washington in a sort of Bertie Wooster outfit as though you were something the Tourist Board had dreamed up to advertise Ye Olde Brytysshe Raylewayes.’

‘I say,’ I said, ‘you pronounced that last bit marvellously.’

‘Moreover,’ he ground on, ‘your ridiculous bowler is dented, your absurd umbrella bent, your shirt covered with blood and you have a black eye.’

‘You should see the other feller?’ I chirrupped brightly, but it didn’t go down a bit well. He was in his stride now.

‘The fact that you are quite evidently as drunk as a fiddler’s bitch in no way excuses a man of your age’ – a nasty one, that – ‘looking and behaving like a fugitive from a home for alcoholic music-hall artistes. I know little of why you are here and I wish to know nothing. I have been asked to assist you if possible, but I have not been instructed to do so: you may assume that I shall not. The only advice I offer is that you do not apply to this Embassy for help if and when you outrage the laws of the United States, for I shall unhesitatingly disown you and recommend imprisonment and deportation. If you turn right when you leave this room you will see the Chancery, where you will be given a receipt for your Silver Greyhound and a temporary civil passport in exchange for your Diplomatic one, which should never have been issued. Good day, Mr Mortdecai.’

With that, he started grimly signing letters or whatever it is that Ambassadors grimly sign when they want you to leave. I considered being horribly sick on his desk but feared that he might declare me a Distressed British Subject there and then, so I simply left the room in a marked manner and stayed not upon the order of my going. But I turned
left
as I went out of the room, which took me into a typists’ pool, through which I strolled debonairly, twirling my brolly and whistling a few staves of ‘Show Us Your Knickers, Elsie.’

I found Bud asleep in the parking lot and he drove me to a nearby saloon, in fact to more than one. I remember one particular place where a portly young woman took off her clothes to music, while dancing on the bar counter within reach of my hand. I had never seen an ecdysiast before; toward the end she was wearing nothing but seven beads, four of them sweat. I think that was the place we were chucked out of.

I know I went to bed but I must admit the details are a bit fuzzy: I’m not sure I even brushed my teeth.