The Mortdecai Trilogy (24 page)

You must wake and call me early, call me early, mother dear;
… It seemed so hard at first, mother …
But still I think it can’t be long before I find release;
And that good man, the clergyman, has told me words of peace.

 

The May Queen

 

The marriage which had been arranged, as the newspapers say, took place, as the newspapers say, the next day at noon. The Vicar preached ripely and briefly, the ladies’ Bach Group sang like little cock-angels, the organist made his organ peal like Kraft-Ebbing’s onion (sorry) and, of course, my brother almost made me puke. The fact that his morning clothes were clearly the work of that genius in Cork Street, whereas mine had been hired in Kendal from a firm which had once made a pair of spats for the Duke of Cambridge, had nothing to do with my disgust. It was his
unction
.

After the ceremony, to make quite sure that he had spoiled my day, he drew me aside and asked me, infinitely tactfully, whether I was quite sure that I could really afford to support a wife who dressed so well, and could he help. While asking this he flicked compassionate glances at the set of my alleged coat around the shoulders.

‘Oh yes, I think I can manage, Robin, but thanks for the offer.’

‘Then she must be the relict of Milton Q. Krampf, who died the other month in odd circumstances, hmh?’

‘I fancy that was his name – why?’

‘Nothing at all, dear boy, nothing at all. But do always remember that you have a home here, won’t you.’

‘Thank you, Robin,’ I said, gnashing mentally. How can a chap as nice as me have a brother like that?

Then he wanted us all to go up to the Hall for champagne and things but I put my foot down; I had taken enough stick for one day and I certainly was not going to bare my buttocks for more. Why, he might even have unlocked his wife from wherever he keeps her, like something from
Jane Eyre
. ‘Brrrr,’ I thought.

So we went to the pub across the road and ordered an Old-Fashioned (Johanna), a split of Roederer (Robin), a Bourbon on the rocks (Blucher), a glass of milk (me) and a half of bitter (the Vicar). The congregation behind us – retired chaps, unemployed chaps and a few idle window-cleaners and coffin-makers – murmured ‘rhubarb, rhubarb’ while the landlady told us that she hadn’t got any of that except the half of bitter. In the end we settled for brandy and soda all round except for the Vicar and the unemployed chaps. (Goodness, have you ever tasted cheap brandy? Don’t, don’t.) Robin insisted on paying, he loves to do things like that and he loves to count the change, it makes him happy.

Then I went to the lav and changed my clothes and gave the hireling garments to Blucher to return to the honest artisan in Kendal – I enjoyed making him do that. Soon afterwards we parted in a spaghetti-like tangle of insincere matiness – except for the Vicar, who was doing his Christian best to believe that we were all nice chaps – and went our separate ways.

My separate way was to be driven two-hundred-odd miles to London in what Johanna called ‘a cute little British auto’ – a Jensen Interceptor. She had no patience with the absurd British affectation of using the left-hand side of the road; I probably secreted more adrenalin in those four hours than Niki Lauda uses in a whole Grand Prix season.

White and quaking, I was decanted at Brown’s Hotel, London, W1, where Johanna firmly sent me to bed for a nap with a huge pottle of brandy and soda. It was, of course, good brandy this time. Sleep, Nature’s kindly nurse, ravelled up the sleeve of care
until dinner-time, when I arose with my nerve-endings more or less adequately darned. We dined in the hotel, which spares me the trouble of saying how good the dinner was. The waiter, who to my certain knowledge has been there since 1938, murmured into my ear that he could recommend the mustard: a statement that has never failed to charm me. Indeed, those were the very words, spoken by that very waiter, which first opened my youthful eyes on the enchanted landscape of gastronomy, long, long ago. (Few men almost no women understand about mustard, you must have noticed that. They think that mustard-powder and water mixed five minutes before dinner makes a condiment; you and I know that this is merely a poultice for sore feet.)

Then we went to the River Room or the Saddle Room or whichever night-club it was that year; my heart was not really in it. I moodily ordered a plate of radishes to throw at passing dancers of my acquaintance but my aim was poor and I desisted after a professional wrestler offered to tear my leg off and beat me with the wet end. Johanna was in tearing high spirits and laughed merrily; she almost charmed away my sense of doom and inadequacy.

Back at the hotel, she showed no signs of fatigue; what she did show me was a nightdress which could have gone through the mail as a postcard if there had been enough space on it to accommodate a postage-stamp.

Only a few of the oysters seemed to be pulling their weight but I was pretty good the first time.

My mental clock is amazingly good: at 10.31 I opened a petulant eye and croaked a complaint to Jock. Where, where, was the life-giving cup of tea, the balm which, at 10.30 precisely, brings the Mortdecais of this world back to some kind of membership of the human race? ‘Jock!’ I croaked again, desperately. A throaty, girlish voice beside me murmured that Jock wasn’t around. I swivelled a bloodshot eyeball and focused it on my bride. She was wearing that absurd nightdress again – it seemed to have lost its shoulder-straps. She was sitting up, toying with
The Times
crossword; the garment in question only afforded modesty because her nipples were supporting it like a pair of chapel hat-pegs. I shut my eyes firmly.

‘Charlie darling?’

‘Grmblumblegroink,’ I said, unconvincingly.

‘Charlie dearest, can you think of a word of seven letters beginning with “m” and ending with a double “e” and meaning “an extra performance in the afternoon”?’

‘Matinée,’ I mumbled.

‘But doesn’t “
matin
” mean morning, Charlie?’

‘Yes, well, the original meaning of matinée was “a way of amusing oneself in the morning”,’ I said learnedly. A moment later I could have bitten off my tongue.

Luckily, one intelligent, public-spirited oyster had been holding itself in reserve against just such a contingency.

It really is quite astonishing how sex affects the sexes. I mean, it usually leaves the chap tottering about and feeling like a disposable dish-rag in search of an incinerator, whereas the female half of the sketch tends to skip about uttering glad cries and exhibiting only those delightful smudges under the eyes which head-waiters would notice. Another by-product of the primal act in women is that they exhibit a frenetic desire to go shopping.

‘Charlie, dear,’ said Johanna, ‘I think I shall go shopping. I hear you have a cute little street right here in London called Bond Street, right? Kind of a poor man’s Rue de Rivoli?’

‘More of a rich man’s
Marché des Puces
,’ I said, ‘but you have the general idea. Almost any taxi-driver will know the way there; it’s almost a furlong. Don’t overtip. Have fun. I’ll go to my bank, I think.’

That was where I went, on foot, for the good of my health. This journey involved passing through the more Chinese parts of Soho – for reasons which I shall presently make clear – and I chanced to glance through the window of a particularly well-set-up-looking restaurant. To my amazement, there sat Johanna, deep in conversation with a portly person who looked like an owner of such a place. She did not see me.

Now, you do not have to be a natural worrier to worry a little at the sight of your bride deep in conversation with Soho restaurant-owners when she has assured you that she is shopping in Bond Street, nor do you have to be a jealous or suspicious man to feel a stirring of curiosity as to what such a bride could possibly have to discuss with such a restaurant-owner. I mean, I had papers to prove that Johanna was my ever-loving wife; I had her word for
it that she was in Bond Street, snapping up bargains in wild mink and such, and the restaurant-owner’s best friend would have felt bound to admit that he, the restaurant-manager, was as Chinese as a restaurant-owner can be, even in Soho.

Pray do not for a moment think that I dislike Chinese chaps; some of my best friends are those who make life beautiful with spare-ribs cooked in oyster sauce, not to mention pieces of duck swaddled in pancakes. No, what disturbed me was a certain wrongness about this situation, a wrongness which imparted an all-too-familiar twitching pang in the soles of my feet. Johanna, you see, was not a liar in the way that ordinary wives are liars. Although my acquaintance with her so far had been brief and torrid, I had formed the opinion that she was too rich, too self-confident, too
clever
to resort to lying in day-to-day matters.

Why, then, was she not in Bond Street, as advertised, scribbling her signature on Travellers’ Cheques and scooping up emerald parures and things?

What I did was what I always do when in doubt: I telephoned Jock.

‘Jock,’ I said, for this was his name, you see, ‘Jock, are you still friends with that rough, ugly, deaf-and-dumb night watchman at those publishers in Soho Square?’

‘Yeah,’ he said succinctly.

‘Then straddle your great motor-bike, Jock, scoop up this sturdy, deaf-and-dumb friend and drop him in Gerrard Street. He is to enter a restaurant called the No Tin Fuk and order a simple, nourishing repast. Give him some money for this because I am sure those publishers he works for keep him short of the readies. When in the restaurant he is to watch, guardedly, a beautiful blonde lady called Mrs M. – yes, the one I married the other day – and to use his skill at lip-reading. She will be talking to a portly Chinese gentleman; I long to know what she is saying.’

‘Right, Mr Charlie.’

‘Make all haste, Jock, please.’

‘That’s us you hear coming round the corner,’ he said.

I replaced the receiver in a courteous position then trotted puzzledly off to my bank. This was not my real bank, where I keep my overdraft, it’s what I call my Savings Bank. It isn’t even a Savings Bank in any ordinary sense of the word: it is
the long-established premises of the most learned print-seller in London, an ancient person who does not approve of me for reasons which I do not understand. Why I call him my Savings Bank is as follows: I have a large and lavishly-produced book called
The Complete Etchings of Rembrandt van Rijn
. Every etching R. van R. ever etched is reproduced in its exact size and so exquisitely that it is hard to believe that they are not the originals. Moreover, these illustrations are ‘tipped in’, which means that they are printed separately and just lightly gummed to the pages by one edge. Whenever I have a few pennies to spare in my pocket, pennies which I might not want to confuse the nice tax-man with, I trundle round to the said print-dealer and buy a Rembrandt etching from him. A real one, of course, for he sells no others. This purchase takes some little while because he is an honest man, you see, and honest men can afford to stick out for the real price. Unlike some I could name.

When I have bought such an etching I toddle home, rip out the appropriate illustration in the
Complete Etchings
, and lovingly replace it with the real one I have just bought. Your common burglar would not dream of nicking such a book but, as it stands today, it’s worth about a quarter of a million in any large city in the world. Decent chaps like me scarcely ever have to flee for our lives but, if we must, it’s nice to have our savings with us unobtrusively. Your common Customs Officer, bless him, is unlikely to spare a glance for a fat, dull art-book with little or no pornographic content, carried by a fat, dull art-dealer.

The ancient dealer, on this occasion, grudgingly admitted that he had a pretty fine second-state impression of ‘The Three Trees’ with thread margins, and gave me the sort of look which art-dealers give you when they are pretty sure that you cannot afford the work of art in question. I, however, was embarrassingly flush with money from my American caper and said disdainfully that what I really had in mind was an impression of the first state of that etching, on vellum. He reminded me that there was only one such example, which happens to be in Samuel Pepys’s scrapbook in the Library of a place called Magdalene College, which is in a town called Cambridge, famed for its unsound scholarship and web-footed peasantry. Forty minutes later he handed over the etching and gave me a glass of better sherry than you would think, while I
parted with a sheaf of great, vulgar currency-notes. Over his largest print-cabinet he has a mahogany tablet inscribed with the words of one of my favourite authors, Psalms xx, 14: ‘
It is naught, it is naught, sayeth the buyer: but when he is gone his way, then he boasteth
.’ As I lurched out, grumbling, he directed my attention to this.

‘There’s an even better writer,’ I snarled, ‘called Psalms xxviii, 20, and
he
says
He that maketh haste to be rich shall not be innocent
!’ I thought I had him there but he blandly asked me which of us I was referring to. You can’t win, you see, you can’t win. Ordinary art-dealers are human beings in their spare time but honest print-sellers are a race apart.

Here is what us scholars call an excursus. If you are an honest man the following page or two can be of no possible interest to you. You are an honest man? You are sure of that? Very well, turn to page 214, because this part is only about how people deploy sums of money which used to belong to other people.

Taking large slabs of money away from other people is, I am told, a simple action for anyone who is strong and brave and doesn’t lose any sleep after hitting people on the head or breaking the law in other ways. Getting it into the fiscal system again in one’s own favour is a different matter altogether. Take a few examples, starting from the bottom.