The Mortdecai Trilogy (48 page)

‘(G); Take particular care not to ladder stockings, tear shoulder-straps or disarrange hair-styles, particularly if the target is a
poor
gel. Virginities are for giving away, after all, but a good hair-do can cost as much as two or three guineas, did you know that?

‘ “All this is all very well” I hear you say’ – I opened my mouth and then shut it resignedly – ‘ “and we’re damned grateful and so forth, but what about getting rid of them when we’ve lost interest and have our eyes on a bit of fresh? How about a few tips on that, eh?” “Ah,” I reply,’ he boomed on, ‘ “there you have me”, for a woman scorned is a pretty adhesive thing and a serious threat to the environment, as they say nowadays. There’s no fixed rule. Sometimes you can, so to speak, recycle her by fobbing her off on a less gifted friend
but I usually find that the best thing is to be frank and manly about it: explain to the subject in kindly words that she has been but the plaything of an idle hour and that now you propose to cast her aside like a soiled glove. Some will acidly reply that “there’s plenty of fresh further up” but most will be so furiously vexed that their love for you will vanish like a rat up a gutter, and they will make their own way to the soiled-glove bin at high speed.’

He chuckled fatly, wheezed, started to cough alarmingly. When he had learned to breathe again I thanked him for his lecturette and reminded him that the subject of my call was yet to be broached.

‘How d’you mean?’ he snorted. ‘Given you enough for a dozen articles.’

‘You have indeed, but I’m not a writer, you know, although I may turn to it if I should ever fall on evil times.’

‘But you
are
the young feller from the
Gazette
Diary, aren’t you?’ He was glaring at me with deep suspicion.

‘Good God, no!’ I cried, shocked for the first time today. ‘What a dreadful … ! I’ve never been so … !’

‘Well, who the devil are you, then, and how did you get in here?’

We sorted it out after a while and soon I had wrung from him his slow consent to my having a sight of the abominable Mass.

As I left the Club, I remarked an inky wretch, shaking with alcohol, whining and carneying to the Hall Porter: I wished him joy of his interview.

The Earl’s house was but a step away. It was one of those Belgravian massifs with fronts like old Euston Station. The servants in such houses are still English (where do they
find
them?) and the step at the front door is so designed that the butler, when he opens the door, looms over you dauntingly. The one who loomed in answer to my ring was a fine, well-grown specimen who had clearly eaten up every scrap of his gruel when he was a nursling butler. His manner was civil, if condescending, but his eye said that he knew all about gents who wanted to read in the master’s library. He stripped me of hat, coat, and umbrella with the ease of a skilled craftsman and led me along a gallery of statuary towards the library. The sculpture was astonishingly fine and of a fruitiness not usually seen outside the rare Supplement to the
Museo Borbonico
. I
could not resist pausing in front of an unusually explicit ‘Leda and the Swan’: I understood at last how the swan had managed the trick. You’d never believe it.

At the end of the gallery there was a sort of vestibule lit only by a concealed ray of light playing on a terminal figure of Pan – the Tree with one Branch – which, as we passed, suddenly became a drinking-fountain in the most dramatic and peculiar way. The butler shunted me into the library, indicated the librarian’s desk and left me to my own devices – or solitary vices, as I dare say he thought. I ambled down an alley of shelves crammed with a bewildering accumulation of priceless, richly-bound filth and rubbish. Nerciat rubbed shoulders with D.H. Lawrence, the Large Paper set of de Sade (Illustrated by Austin Osman Spare) jostled an incunable
Hermes Trismegistus
, and ten different editions of
L’Histoire d’O
were piquant bedfellows to De la Bodin’s
Démonomanie des Sorciers
.

The Earl’s librarian was a pretty slip of a girl with circles under her eyes. She didn’t look as though she got much time for reading.

‘Are you
Green Girls in Paris
?’ she asked. I thought about it.

‘No, I’m more the Mass of S. Sécaire, really.’

‘Ah, yes. I’ve put it out for you. It’s in a nice plain seventeenth-century cursive without contractions, so you shouldn’t have much trouble. I’ve also put out a plain Latin Missal; it’ll save you a lot of time, you need only copy out the variant passages.’

‘Thanks, you’re very kind.’

‘Not at all. That will be fifty pounds, please.’

‘Fifty pounds? But surely, that’s unheard of between fellow scholars. I mean, common courtesy …’

‘The Earl is not a scholar and common courtesy is outside his sphere of interest. He has just instructed me on the telephone that the fee is fifty pounds and that you have already had – I think he said racing tips – worth more than that.’

I reflected that George and Sam were sharing out-of-pocket expenses so I coughed up, although with ill grace. She wouldn’t accept a Diner’s Club card, she wouldn’t take a cheque, but she would send a footman round to Carlos Place, where squat the proprietors of my overdraft, buttock-deep in pieces-of-eight. The box-office formalities over, I spent a long and disgusting hour or two copying out the relevant passages of the Mass in a silence broken
only by the fidgeting and snickering of the man who had arrived to read
Green Girls in Paris
– an aged person whose thoughts should have been on higher things.

‘Faugh,’ I thought.

Then I had a bath and a few drinks and things at my own club – a temple of light compared with Dunromin’s hell-hole – and flew back to Jersey.

Jock met me at the airport in the ‘Big Jam-Jar’ as he calls the Rolls. The news was not good. Johanna had not been raped but the wife of a friendly doctor, living a mile from us, had. A bogus call to a road-accident had lured her husband away. The rapist had unscrewed the bulb from the light over the porch and rung the door-bell. The other details were as before.

‘And I found out from the new gardener, the old geezer, what this sword on the belly means,’ said Jock.

‘So have I,’ I said. ‘Did he seem to connect it with Easter at all?’

‘Nah. He kept on saying it was because of the Pakis, which is daft, innit, ’cos there’s no Pakis on the Island except them shops in St Helier, where they sell the duty-free watches.’

‘Jock, the French word for Easter is
Pâques
: in the toothless mouth of an ancient Jerseyman it would, indeed, sound just like “Pakis”.’

‘Well, there you are, aren’t you?’

‘Yes. What’s the word on Mrs Sam?’

‘Well, not great. I hear she got worse and they took her off to the mainland ’smorning. Mr Davenant’s been ringing up to find when you’re expected back; he sounds in a bit of a mess.’

‘Oh dear, do you think he’ll be round this evening?’

‘No, he was ringing up from England. He’ll be back tomorrow morning, wants to come to lunch.’

‘So he shall,’ I said. ‘So he shall. But, more to the point, is there anything for my supper tonight?’

‘Yeah, I got you a nice little treat of kidneys done in wine and mustard on fried bread with a few sauté potatoes all garlicky.’

‘The very thing!’ I cried. ‘I trust you will join me, Jock?’

‘Too bloody right I will, Mr Charlie.’

What adders came to shed their coats?
What coiled obscene
Small serpents with soft stretching throats
Caressed Faustine?

 

Faustine

 

Spring was infesting the air in no uncertain fashion the next day and I awoke, for once, with a feeling of well-being and an urge to go for long country walks. Needing to share this feeling I marched into Johanna’s room and flung the curtains wide.

‘How can you
lie
there,’ I cried, ‘with the sun streaming in and all the world going a-Maying?’

I didn’t quite catch the two words she mumbled in reply, but they were not ‘good morning’.

Soon I was downstairs, stamping about and disrupting the household by demanding a proper breakfast instead of my usual alka-seltzer and dexedrin. It was all quite delicious – porridge and kippers and bacon and eggs and toast and marmalade except that the last mouthful of bacon turned to ashes in my mouth when Jock dumped the mail beside my plate, for on top of the pile lay one of those dread, buff-coloured envelopes marked OHMS. I quaked as I read. Her Majesty’s Inspector of Taxes noted with feigned puzzlement that, according to my Tax Return for the previous year, my expenditure had exceeded my income; what, then, he asked with concern, had I been living on? He managed to suggest,
although not in so many words, that he was
worried
about me. Was I
eating
properly?

I wrote him a cheque for an entirely irrelevant £111.99 which would fox the computer for a month or two, then I spent a happy ten minutes erasing the name and address on the letter and typing in a fresh one, re-directing it to my new-found friend, the lady-don of Scone College.
Share
the good things of life is what I always say. We shall pass this way but once, you know.

George arrived before Sam and told me about the rapist’s latest exploit. He had telephoned the victim’s husband that morning for they were friends and had confirmed the gossip that all the nasty magical trappings had been in evidence. There was still no description worth the name: the doctor’s wife had tried, sturdy lass, to snatch the man’s mask off while he was most deeply preoccupied with his task but he had immediately stunned her with a blow to the temple with the side of his clenched fist – a surprisingly kind blow and, it seemed to me, rather a knowledgeable one. All she could say with certainty was that he was strong, well-built and perhaps in early middle age.

‘It seems she’s not too shaken up,’ George went on, ‘been a nurse, you see, in the Army. Hard to shock those lassies. She’s more furious than anything else, I gather.’

‘And how’s Sonia?’

‘Oh, well, she still plays up a bit when she remembers to, but on the whole I’d say she was pretty well recovered. Not like poor Vi, she seems to have been knocked for six. By the way, be careful what you say to Sam, he’s taking it very hard. Quite murderous.’

Sam entered as though on cue; paler than usual, less kempt, a humourless look on his face. He swallowed half the drink I gave him before sitting down.

‘Well?’ was what he snapped when he did sit down.

‘No, Sam,’ I said, ‘nothing is well and I should prefer to discuss things after we have all refreshed ourselves a little, don’t you agree?’ He only glared, not agreeing at all, so I went about on the other tack.

‘But first,’ I said, ‘if you feel like talking about it, we are anxious to know how things are with Violet. Where is she, for instance?’

He finished his drink with a second swallow. It had been really quite a stiff drink for lunch-time. I made him another, giving myself a touch more freedom with the soda-water this time.

‘Awful bloody place near Virginia Water,’ he said at last. ‘Not the big Virginia Water place but one of the other nursing homes round there which specialize in what they like to call Nervous Disorders. Frightful Victorian barracks in Revived Lombardic Gothic; rather like Manchester Town Hall but with rhododendrons and monkey-puzzle trees all around it. Pink, portly consultants flouncing down the corridors, each with comet’s tail of adoring matrons and sisters and nurses and lavatory attendants trailing behind them, like little boys following a horse with a shovel and bucket for the good of their father’s roses. Foul bitch of a receptionist broke it to me gently that the charges were £60 a day then watched me narrowly to see if I winced. “Payable fortnightly in advance,” she went on. I gave her a cheque for eight hundred and forty pounds and she said that “doctor” would probably see Violet that night. I said that for eight hundred and forty pounds “doctor” would bloody well see her there and then. She looked at me as though I’d farted in church. We had
words
then, and I won, although I had to apologize for saying “bloody”.’

‘I pity the prawn which pits its feeble wits against you,’ I quoted. His glare told me that flippancy was not suited to the mood of the moment. (I can’t help it you know: some unkind friend once showed me a passage in a Medical Encyclopedia.

‘MORIA:’ it said – ‘
A morbid determination to make supposedly witty remarks. Sometimes occurring in people with frontal growths of the brain
.’)

‘ “Doctor”,’ he went on, ‘proved to be a Viennese Jewess –’

‘Just like Johanna,’ I reminded him brightly, before he could put his foot in it.

‘Not at all like Johanna. This was Baudelaire’s original “
affreuse juive
”, she looked like a malevolent sack of potatoes. But surprisingly civilized and clearly on top of her job. She listened to the receptionist’s account of things with her hands folded in her lap, she didn’t look at her once but the receptionist was choking back tears in no time. Amazing old bitch. She had that kind of cheerful callousness you only find in the very best doctors: I’ve no faith in the grave, considerate ones: I knew too many medical students at Oxford. Then she took me up to her office and asked about Violet’s people and of course I had to tell her about “Lucia di Lammermoor”.’

I made tactful noises. ‘Lucia di Lammermoor’ is what Sam calls his mother-in-law, who is about as
affreuse
as any mother-in-law can aspire to be. She dresses like a sixteen-year-old in dirndl skirts and little socks, her hair is long and gold and false and her face looks like an accident in a paint-factory. She is always in and out of expensive nursing homes for the nervously afflicted but whether this is just a rich woman’s hobby or whether she is a boozer who has to be dried out periodically or whether she really is barmy none of her family has ever decided – or much cared. When last heard-of she had taken wing to North Africa with an eighteen-year-old faith-healer who also happened to be a lift-attendant.

‘I gave Dr Wankel – yes, Golda Wankel – the names of the last two loony-bins she’s patronized and she rang them up straight away – said it could be important – but neither of them could find the case-history or whatever it’s called. Odd, that, don’t you think?’

‘Only fairly odd.’

‘Eh? Oh. I see. Well, then, she asked me all sorts of peculiar things about Violet – does she sort of tend to misinterpret things, does she muddle common turns of phrase – well, you know how we all tease her about saying things like “crafty as a door-nail” and “dead as a wagon-load of monkeys” – and I had to answer “yes” to an awful lot of them, which really made me quite worried.’

His speech was getting a little wobbly: I have a horror of seeing my fellow-men weep. I made him a monstrous drink and tried to change the subject. He took the drink and rallied, but he would not wear the change of subject.

‘The next bit was rather awful,’ he went on steadily. ‘We went up to where Violet had been put – nice enough room – and Dr Wankel squirted some sodium amytal into her. It stopped her staring at one in that awful way but it didn’t make her utter at all. La Wankel lifted her arm up (Violet’s, I mean) and it just stayed there. Then she bent it and it stayed there, too. She said that’s called “
flexibilitas cereas
”, which is typical of something or other, it seems. Then she shoved her arms down again and tapped it gently and every time it was tapped it rose a little – like an Anglepoise lamp. That’s called “
mitgehen
” apparently. Rather beastly to watch. Then I was chucked out so that Wankel could give her a thorough physical examination and I had to wait outside for about a hundred years. Afterwards I was too knocked-out to
pay much attention but I gathered that it was a toss-up whether Violet’s trance was depressive or catatonic and that the difference was important. Either way there seems to be a good chance that Violet might suddenly rouse and dive out of the window – the catatonics seem to get the idea that they’re angels – and that turns out to mean an agency nurse all round the clock at another huge sum per diem. Then the kindly Wankel gave me a bed – free! – and a pill, and I slept until ’plane-time this morning and that’s all.’

I made him another drink, it was easier than saying anything.

Jock, his timing as perfect as ever, announced luncheon and we sat down to gulls’ eggs, terrine of rabbit and cold curry puffs. I defy anyone to dwell on private miseries with one of Jock’s cold curry puffs melting on his tongue, they stand alone, they really do. We drank bottled beer, for I disapprove of wine at luncheon: it either promotes drowsiness or inflames the animal spirits – either way it wastes the afternoon. Sam was a trifle less jumpy when victualled; George seemed somnolent, unwilling to join in.

‘Now,’ Sam said, ‘tell us about the Oxford venture, Charlie. What did your emeritus Magus suggest?’

I told them, trying to keep the apologetic tone from my voice, doing my best to offer blasphemous folly as the only kind of reason which could prevail. What had seemed to make sense in Oxford sounded merely crack-pot over a Jersey luncheon-table and their blank stares, their shared sidelong glances, did not much help me toward persuasiveness. I ended lamely.

‘And if you fellows can offer anything better,’ I ended lamely, ‘I’d be delighted to hear it.’

There was a long, treacly silence. George ran an exploratory index finger over each hair in his eyebrows, then checked the lobes of his ears and the cleft in his chin before starting to remind himself of the contours of his thumb-shaped nose.

Sam, on the other hand, was motionless, seeming rapt in the study of a curry-stain on the tablecloth.

Jock came in and cleared things away while George and Sam maintained their silences. I was damned if I was going to help them start the ball rolling; indeed, it occurred to me that many worthy people would say that I was damned already.

‘All right,’ said Sam at last. ‘I’m prepared to give it a crack of the whip. If the swine’s as demented as he seems to be, then I suppose we can best fight him with this insane garbage.’

George nodded slowly.

‘Probably the only language he understands,’ he said in a sort of gritty, country-magistrate’s voice. ‘Distasteful. Probably useless. Certainly expensive. But, as Charlie says, what else comes to mind? Seen stranger things than this taking effect, now I come to think of it. Yes; in India, places like that.’

‘You men do realize,’ I said, ‘that you’ll have to sort of participate, don’t you? I mean, there’s one or two rather dreary things that have to be done during the Mass, you see, and the unfrocked priest will, so to speak, have his hands full for much of the time.’

‘Yes,’ said Sam.

‘Yes, I suppose so,’ said George. ‘But I’m damned if I’m memorizing any Black Paternosters backwards or any of that rot.’

‘Black Paternosters?’ I asked. ‘Have you been studying the subject a bit, George?’

‘We’ve all read our Dennis Wheatley at some time or another, Charlie,’ said Sam.

‘Speak for yourself!’ I said sharply.

‘Let me get it clear in my head,’ George said. ‘This mummery is supposed to discourage the witch-chap and make him feel that we’re as well in with demons and things as he is, so he’d better lay off, is that it?’

‘More or less, but there’s a bit more to it than that. You see, it embodies a fairly hefty curse which is supposed to make the object of our attentions waste away and die nastily, so if our man really believes in what he’s doing and is familiar with this particular ritual – and Dryden is pretty sure he does and is – he ought to be thoroughly scared and might well give up his activities altogether.’

‘West African witch-doctors can still do it,’ said George. ‘Thousands of well-documented cases. If the victim really believes he’s going to die on a certain day he just jolly well lies down and dies.’

‘Do you mean to say,’ Sam asked slowly, ‘that there’s a chance that this thing might actually kill our man?’

‘Well, yes, I’m afraid it seems quite possible.’

‘Excellent. When do we start?’

‘Just one moment,’ said George, ‘it’s occurred to me – how does the fellow know that this Mass has been performed and what Mass it is and who’s on the receiving end and so on?’

‘I’m glad you asked that,’ I said. ‘There’s only one way and it will cost us all a certain amount of embarrassment but it will work.’

I then told them the method. After a noisy and acrimonious ten minutes they agreed to it, but our friendship did not come unscathed out of the discussion.

Jock came in at that point with a telegram
on a salver
: he loves to show off in front of what he calls Company. I suspect that he’d really love to be a proper manservant; perhaps I’ll buy him a striped waistcoat for Christmas.

The wire was from Dryden. Its wording made me boggle for a moment: ‘
DESHABILLE ARRIVES FALAISEWISE TOMORROW TURNIP PASTIES ESSENTIAL
’.

If Dryden has fault it is that he fancies himself a master of telegraphese; it grieves his friends mightily. There was a time when he could take it or leave it alone but now, I fear, he is ‘medically dependent’ as the booze-doctors say. The
déshabille
clearly meant ‘the unfrocked one’, the
Falaise
is one of the Weymouth-to-Jersey mail-packets, ‘pasties’ was obviously a textual emendation of ‘Pastis’ by some officious Post Office worker but ‘turnip’ remained as obscure as it had been on Oxford Station.