The Mortdecai Trilogy (40 page)

‘You did wonderfully well, Charlie dear. I have been so proud of you.’

‘Yes, you really did, Charlie old boy.’ He put an arm about my wife’s shoulders and kissed her noisily on the cheek. This was too much. My knuckles were now Whiter-Than-White and I’m confident that any trained observer would have observed that the veins in my forehead were bulging out like firemen’s hoses. I rose to my feet, eyeing them dangerously. We Mortdecais do not make
a practice of tearing our guests limb from limb, especially when there are ladies present, however base and treacherous the lady. I must confess, however, that I came pretty close to breaking this rule, and indeed might well have done so had I not recalled that it simply is not done to strike a guest whose posture, while embracing one’s wife, betrays a shameless bulge under the left armpit, where a large, coarse automatic pistol evidently lurks. I stalked out of the room in a marked manner. I did not trip over anything, nor did I slam the door.

Jock, staunch fellow, was in the kitchen, his great boots propped up on the hygienic working-surface. He peered at me over the top edge of his copy of
Film Fun
. I launched a great kick at the nearest pastel-coloured eezi-slide kitchen-fitment and dented it severely. Jock rummaged in a pocket for his glass eye, moistened it in the mug of tea before him and popped it deftly into its socket.

‘You all right, Mr Charlie?’

‘I am in splendid form, Jock,’ I snarled, ‘capital, topping, never better. We cuckolds feel no pain, you know.’ He gaped as I delivered a truly mighty kick at the same fitment. This time my foot went through it and was trapped in the ruptured plastic and three-ply. Jock helped me get my shoe off with the aid of the kitchen scissors and I was able to free my foot and limp to the kitchen table.

‘Reckon that old kick done you a power of good, Mr Charlie, better than a week at the seaside. Anything else you fancy?’

‘How is the canary?’ I countered. ‘Still sulking?’

‘Nah, he’s back in lovely voice, a fair treat to listen to him, I had to put a clorth over his cage to shut the little bugger up. What I done was, I give him some hard-boiled egg, a pinch of cayenne in his hempseed and a sup of rum in his drinking water and now, bing-bong, he’s ready to take on all comers. Booking for smoking-concerts now.’

‘Give me that very cure, Jock,’ I said moodily, ‘but leaving out the hard-boiled egg, the cayenne, the hempseed and the drinking-water.’

‘Right, Mr Charlie; one large Navy rum coming up. Er, will Madam be wanting anythink?’

‘I could not say. She seems to be in close conference with Colonel Blucher.’

‘Yeah, well, she hasn’t seen him for munce, has she?’

‘I could not say.’

‘Well, he is her bruvver, inne?’

‘Jock, what the hell are you talking about?’

‘Well, I mean, Mrs M is his
sister
, isn’t she? Same thing, innit?’ Many things began to become clear; one of the clearest of these things was that for once in my life I had behaved like a twit.

‘Oh, ah?’ I said.

‘Yeah,’ said Jock. I re-assembled what I like to think of as my thoughts.

‘Jock,’ I said, ‘unswathe the said canary; I long to hear a few of its dulcet notes. But in doing so pray do not forget the large glass of Navy rum which I ordered quite ninety seconds ago.’ As the honest fellow clumped towards the pantry I recalled something which had been simmering in the back of my mind all the live-long day: the very crux or pivot of the whole situation, the pin upon which everything turned.

‘Jock!’ I cried anguishedly. He stopped in his tracks, span upon his heel.

‘Jock, please add one of your extra-special jam-sandwiches to that order, if you will be so kind.’

‘Right, Mr Charlie; that’s one large rum, one jem semwidge.’

‘And one canary.’

‘Right, Mr Charlie.’

‘Right, Jock,’ I said.

Because I do not expect to survive to write another novel about Jersey, I must ask, in alphabetical order, Alan, Angela, Barry, Betty, Bobbie, Dick, Gordon, Heather, Hugh, Jean, Joan, John, Mary, Nick, Olive, Paul, Peter, Rosemary, Stanley, Terry, Topper, Vera – and a hundred other kindly Jersey folk to accept this as a trifling repayment for all their kindness and tolerance. I hope, too, that they will not mind if I add the names of a black Labrador named Pompey and a canary called Bert. The epigraphs are all by Swinburne, except one which is a palpable forgery.

None of the people in this novel bears any intentional resemblance to any real person: real people are far too improbable for use in fiction.

The Honorary Police of Jersey are used to being teased: all those whom I have had the pleasure of meeting are just, honourable, intelligent and can take a joke.

I must not thank by name all the kindly Jersey folk who have answered my countless questions – that would be a poor recompense for their patience.

The fictional narrator is a nasty, waspish man: pray do not confuse him with the author, who is gentle and kind.

The Swinburne forgery is, in a way, signed.

Till the slow sea rise and the sheer cliff crumble,
Till terrace and meadow the deep gulfs drink,
Till the strength of the waves of the high tides humble
The fields that lessen, the rocks that shrink,
Here now in his triumph where all things falter,
Stretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread,
As a god self-slain on his own strange altar,
Death lies dead.

 

A Forsaken Garden

 

Seven thousand years ago – give or take a few months – a great deal of water left the North Sea for good reasons of its own which I cannot recall off-hand and poured over the lower parts of North-West Europe, forming the English Channel and effectively separating England from France, to the mutual gratification of both parties (for if it had not happened, you see, we English would have been foreigners and the French would have had to eat bread sauce).

Not much later the sea scoured away at some of the craggier bits of the French coast and separated part of the higher ground from the mainland. You call the resulting islands the Channel Isles because you know no better: their true and ancient name is
Les Iles Normandes
. It has been argued that they do not belong to the
United Kingdom but rather the other way about, for they were part of the Duchy of Normandy long before William did his conquering in England – and they are the only surviving parts of that Duchy. They are fiercely loyal to the Crown and the toast is still ‘The Queen – our Duke’. The Isles all have different, ancient and peculiar laws and constitutions, as well as some pretty odd customs. Of which more later.

It is called Jersey and is constructed of granite, shale, diorite and porphyrite, as every schoolboy knows. The whole thing is sort of tilted so that it faces south, which I’m sure is good for the weather. (I never discuss the weather; that is for resort-owners, the peasantry, and certain gentle maniacs who choose to inhabit the Admiralty roof.) The coastline is wild and lovely past belief.

Tobacco and ardent spirits are cheap and income tax benignly low but I dare say these blessings will vanish, along with the Public Schools, as soon as the Socialists get a real majority and start to feel their oats.

There are many layers of these. First, the holiday-makers, who need no description, bless them. Their name is legion.

Next, the farmers, who are all of old Jersiais stock, and, in an unobtrusive and po-faced way, run the Island to their own quiet satisfaction. They have ugly old names, ugly old faces and
hideous
old wives. Their workers are like them but drunker. Some transient peasants drift in from Normandy, Brittany and even Wales to see to the daffodil, potato and tomato harvests; they are small and squat and sinister, like Italians from the Abruzzi, and they are the drunkest of all and who shall blame them.

Third, and best known, are the rich immigrants who have come to enjoy the Isle’s peculiar tax benefits. The modest tax they pay swells the local coffers in a way the Jerseyman finds hard to forgive. Some of them are total abstainers, which I suppose is one way of becoming rich, but most of them are pretty drunk too: whisky is about the same price as cheap wine – and much nicer.

They have brought so much money with them that I sometimes
fear the Isle may one day sink beneath its weight. Their conversation is brilliant so long as you stick to the subject of the length of their drawing-rooms – or ‘lounges as they are called in the local
argot
.

Hordes of bankers and other money-borrowers, of every degree of venality, have followed them here like greedy shite-hawks and each prime site in St Helier is snapped up by these shameless guzzlers as soon as it falls vacant. This is probably a bad thing.

There are several minor categories like nobility and gentry, Portuguese waiters, Indian trumpery-mongers, transient barmaids and drunken novelists but these, although uniformly nice, concern our story but little.

The prop of the economy, and the only large mammal other than the Jersey lady, is the Jersey cow. She is doe-eyed and quite beautiful and secretes wonderfully rich milk. She is usually tethered because pasture is precious and fences are costly; in winter she is ‘rugged’ with a plastic mackintosh and in summer she sports a sun-bonnet. Yes, truly. There are some pigs but I believe no sheep, which is perhaps why a certain Highland Regiment has never been stationed here. There is a great number of horses and the suburban cavalry may be seen tittuping along the lanes at any hour of the day.

Wild-life is scarce except for sea-birds; the dominant species are the magpie and the sparrow. There is no shooting land and therefore no gamekeepers, so the ubiquitous magpie munches up all the nestlings; only the sparrow, that bird of Venus, can outbreed magpies by diddling his mate all the year round, sturdy little chap. In the late autumn small rare birds may sometimes be seen on passage, resting in the fields of unborn daffodils.

This is chiefly grass and gardening, the latter often of an excruciating garishness. There is some bracken and gorse on parcels of land wailing for planning permission but all the rest is luxury crops: early potatoes, daffodils, anemones, tomatoes and the
occasional shy cauliflower. Certain cabbages with prodigally long stalks are grown for tourists to photograph: the natives assure them with straight faces that these are grown for walking-sticks but no one in his senses would believe that, would he?

These range from the gloomy to the absurd via the pretentious. St Helier is a positive barrel of architectural fun: even Sir John Betjeman would be unable to keep a straight face. In the countryside the characteristic building is a large, grim farmhouse made of liver-coloured granite, with huge outer walls and a shortage of windows. Rich incomers grab them avidly and modernize them hideously. The finished article is worth ten times the price of a comparable house in England. I don’t know whether that’s a good thing or not.

This is rather a difficult bit. Your actual Jerseyman of the artisan classes speaks something which sounds quite like English until you try to understand it, then you realize that it is like an Australian trying to imitate a Liverpudlian. ‘His’ is pronounced ‘ease’ and most sentences begin with the phrase ‘My Chri’ and end with the vocable ‘eh?’ It is an unlovely tongue and one can readily learn to dislike it.

Laws and other official matter are written in a quaint old Norman-French reminiscent of Domesday-Book Latin. Members of the grand old Jersey families can still speak it, I’m told, but you won’t get them to admit it.

The true
patois Jersiais
is something quite different and barbarous beyond belief. (
Guinness es bouan por té
.) When I tell you that the word ‘Jersey’ represents the Latin ‘Caesarea’ I think you will take my meaning.

Finally, most tradespeople can produce enough schoolboy French of modern vintage to puzzle the transient workers with, especially since the latter are usually tired and drunk.

There is a small body of men, based in St Helier, called the Paid Police. I’m sure they love that. They are much like English police but fewer and not so angry. They have uniforms and equipment; they seem honest and amiable; they don’t hit people. Unlike some I could name.

Much more important (outside St Helier) are the Honorary Police, who are of course unpaid. They do not wear uniforms – you are supposed to
know
who they are. Each of the twelve Parishes has a Connétable; under him are the Centeniers, each of whom in theory, protects and disciplines a hundred families and leads five Vingteniers who guard twenty families each. These are all elective posts but elections rarely afford any surprises, if you see what I mean, and in any case there is little competition for these honours.

No one is legally under arrest in Jersey until a Centenier has tapped him on the shoulder with his absurd, tiny truncheon of office (you can imagine how the Paid Police like
that
rule) and it is said that a Centenier who has mislaid his truncheon wrenches off the handle from the nearest lavatory chain. Luckily, Centeniers do not often feel it necessary to arrest their friends, neighbours and cousins, unless the offence is grave, and thus a great deal of public money is saved and a great many lavatories are left intact. It works quite well, really. The Centenier takes his erring neighbour for a quiet chat and puts the fear of God in him, thus preventing a recurrence of the offence much more effectively than an expensive trial, a suspended sentence and a year of reporting to some mud-brained Probation Officer with a diploma in Social Science from Nersdley Polytechnic.

It belongs to Sam Davenant and is called La Gouluterie, from a water-meadow which is part of the estate. This probably takes its name from Simon le Goulue who was Connétable of S. Magloire Parish in 1540, but zealous antiquaries suspect that
goulues
– round-bellied pottery crocks for seething beans in – were once potted in this clayey field. I suspect that Simon or one of his forebears was called ‘le Goulue’ because he was a bit of a bean-crock himself.
The dottier kind of amateur antiquary will, of course, assure you that the name has something to do with fertility-rites, but then they always do, don’t they?

Much of the building dates from the sixteenth century and there are traces of earlier work and hints of religious use. It is of a pleasant, pink granite of the sort no longer quarried and it has been tactfully coaxed into a state of comfort and dignity. There are tourelles, rondelines, bénitiers and so forth – I’m sure you know what all those are. For my part, I forget. Most of the front is at the back – doors, terraces and so on – but the front proper faces a sunny, agreeable courtyard on the other side of which lies the Other House, which belongs to Sam’s best friend.

This belongs to George Breakspear who is Sam’s best friend and it is called Les Cherche-fuites – I don’t know what that means. It has been extensively dandified in the eighteenth century and its windows, because of the exigencies of the underlying granite, are all slightly out of kilter, which rescues it from the drab symmetry of most houses of that period. Like La Gouluterie, much of its front is at the back (gardens, pool etc.) and at the back, too, there is a curious and engaging porch with concave glazing of the kind associated in Jersey with ‘cod houses’ – places built in the piping times of the cod industry when dozens of daring Jersey skippers ventured to the Grand Banks and suddenly found themselves rich. At one side there is an ugly Victorian stable of yellow brick with a clock which doesn’t go.

These two agreeable houses beaming affably at each other across the old stone cider-press in the centre of the courtyard; consider, too, how rare and fortunate it is that the owners should be such firm friends. (The fact that the owners’ wives loathe each other’s essential tripes is of little importance, one supposes, and indeed it rarely comes to the surface even when they are alone.)

The proprietors of these houses, starting with George Breakspear
of Les Cherche-fuites. George believes in God, but only the C. of E. brand, as advertised on television by virtue of the Equal Time Agreement, although he has an Open Mind because he has seen some Pretty Queer Things in India and places like that. His manners are too good to let his religion show, which is as it should be. He is not a fool. You would guess that he had been a brevet major in the War; in fact he was a full and substantive brigadier and holds the DSO, the MC and many another bauble but, here again, his too stringent manners forbid him to use either the rank or the ribandry in civil life. (This is going a little too far, I think: it is subtly
rude
to keep your honours in your handkerchief drawer along with the french letters. Give me, any day, those jolly European hussar officers who swagger out at night in their splendid comic-opera uniforms, rather than those po-faced English Guardees who change, at the drop of a bowler hat, into sad imitations of solvent stockbrokers. Officers should have dash and debts and drabs and, above all, duns, whom they can horsewhip outside their quarters to give them an appetite for breakfast, don’t you agree?)

George is of middle height, average appearance and normal weight. His friends do not always recognize him, which is what it’s all about, isn’t it. In his favourite armchair in his club they recognize him, of course, because he’s
there
you see. The better sort of bartenders recognize him, too, but that’s their job.

His clothes are in such quiet good taste that they almost amount to a disguise, a cloak of invisibility, perhaps.

Despite this greyish coloration one somehow knows for certain that, were the Hun or Boche to invade us, George would not only spring capably to arms on the instant but would, without debate or question, assume command by invoking some ancient English password, token or shibboleth which we would all recognize, although hearing it for the first time since King Arthur sank below the waves of that lake near Avalon.

In the meantime, however, here and now in Jersey, one certainly didn’t want not to know him, for he listened to one’s stories; he poured big (but not vulgarly big) drinks; did not smile too unhappily if one swore in front of his wife and, if the party lasted too long for him, he didn’t make going-to-bed noises, he
just sort of faded away and re-materialized, one supposes, in his dressing-room.

He drinks quite a lot in a diffident sort of way; there’s no shooting in Jersey, you see, and that makes the winter days rather long unless you happen to be over-sexed.