The Mortdecai Trilogy (45 page)

God is buried and dead to us,
Even the spirit of earth,
Freedom; so have they said to us,
Some with mocking and mirth,
Some with heartbreak and tears;
And a God without eyes, without ears,
Who shall sing of him, dead in the birth?

 

To Walt Whitman in America

 

I took the noon flight for Heathrow the next day. I’m not one of the jet-set, more of the biplane set, Johanna says, but I don’t at all mind flying except in those terrifying little planes where you sit in the open behind the driver and have to rap on his helmet if you want to tell him to slow down a bit. This was a large, experienced-looking craft and it said on the side that its engines came from the Rolls-Royce stable, most reassuring. Two Jersey worthies whom I know slightly took the seats beside me and, when we were air-borne, I ordered three large gins-and-tonic with my customary munificence. The hostess asked me if I wanted them all in one glass; I believe she was being
pert
.

You don’t have to go right into London nowadays if you’re headed West: an airlines bus takes you from Heathrow to Reading quite painlessly and trains thence to Oxford, where Dryden, my old tutor, hoves, are plentiful.

Goodness, have you
seen
Oxford Station since they did it up? It’s
quite amazingly smart and modern and not much more than twice as inconvenient as it was before.

Something quite dreadful happened to me as I stood outside the station waiting for Dryden: a leprous creature, clad in filthy tatters, beard matted and barbaric necklaces jingling, shambled up to me, mopping and mowing, his demeanour both piteous and threatening.

‘Be off with you!’ I quavered valiantly, brandishing my umbrella. ‘I shall not submit to your mugging; I happen to be a personal friend of the station-master, aye, and of the Warden of All Souls, too!’

‘Mr Mortdecai?’ he fluted in the purest Wykehamist tones. ‘My name’s Francis, I’m a pupil of Dr Dryden, he’s asked me to pick you up, he can’t come himself, he’s got the squitters.
I’ve
got the crabs, if you want to know,’ he added gloomily. ‘And a tutorial and two demos tomorrow.’

I fumbled around in my word-bag for a while.

‘How do you do?’ I said at length.

He took charge of my suitcase and led me to about five thousand pounds’ worth of Italian GT motor-car in which we vroomed painlessly towards the dreaming-spires section of the city. I didn’t know quite what to chat about, it’s the generation gap I suppose. He was extraordinarily civil and, on closer inspection, as clean as can be. I think he was just boasting about the crabs.

Scone College, my
alma mater
, hadn’t changed a bit except that the outside was richly adorned with huge painted words such as ‘PEACE’, ‘SHIT’, ‘TROTSKY LIVES’ and similar sentiments. I thought it something of an improvement, for it took one’s eyes off the architecture. Fred was on duty in the Porter’s Lodge as he had been when I was there last: he remembered me well and said that I owed him half a sovereign in connection with some long-forgotten horse-race. I wasn’t taken in, but I coughed up.

My rooms were ready for me and quite habitable, except that the undergraduate incumbent (this was in the vacation, you see) had pinned up a poster of a little fat black chap called Maharaj ji Guru in such a position that it smirked at the bed. I couldn’t move the chap’s poster, naturally, so I moved the bed. Bathed and changed, I still had half an hour to spend before I could report at the Senior Common Room where Dryden would, if recovered, meet me and take me to dinner at High Table, so
I strolled over to the Buttery. On the lawn where, in the brave days, we used to play croquet some forty tatterdemalions were squatting silently – a sorry sight. No doubt they were meditating or protesting; they certainly weren’t having any fun. As I strolled past them in my exceedingly beautiful dinner jacket I raised a hand in benediction.

‘Peace!’ I said.

‘Shit!’ said a spokesman.

‘Trotsky lives!’ I answered stoutly. You see, you
can
communicate with young people if you take the trouble to learn their lingo.

‘Hallo, Mr Mortdecai,’ said Henry, the buttery steward, ‘have you been away?’

‘No, no, no,’ I said, ‘I was here only seven years ago.’

‘So you were, sir. End of a Trinity term it was, I fancy, and you were rude to one of those Hungarian persons that are all over the place now – I can’t ever say their names, they always seem to come out rude-sounding when I try.’

‘I know just what you mean, Henry. And I’m dying of thirst.’

He really did remember me, for he reached down one of the battered pewter quarts from which we giants used to sup our ale in the olden days. I strolled outside with my tankard so that I could pour half its contents surreptitiously onto the lawn, for I am not the man I was.

‘I suppose you find that sort of thing a bit galling, don’t you, Henry?’ I said, waving my hand towards the solemn sit-in on the lawn.

‘Oh, I dunno. I’ve been here all my life, as well you know. They’re not much different from your year, or any year. When I first come here it was top hats and frock-coats on Sunday and parading up and down the Broad Walk; then it was riding-breeches and fox-terriers; then it was Oxford bags and
bull
-terriers. After the war it was them blue demob suits, then tweed jackets and flannels; then straw bashers and blazers come back in and then it was jeans and bare feet and now it’s beards and beads and probably tomorrow it’ll be top hats again. Only thing I got against this lot is they will eat chocolate-bars with their little gills of beer, and they spend half their money on the french-letter machine in the Junior Common Room. They should be drinking their beer and rowing their boats
and learning their books; there’s plenty of time for all that sex when they’ve got their degrees.’

‘Just so,’ I said. I bade him good night, donned my gown and set sail for the SCR.

Dryden was profuse in his apologies for not having met me at the station.

‘I do hope Margate found you without difficulty?’

‘Margate? No, it was a rum chap called Francis.’

‘Yes, that’s right, Francis Margate. A
very
nice boy. Brightest Viscount I’ve taught for years.’

‘I hope your, ah, squitters are better, John? Your pupil seemed to be concerned about you.’

‘Oh, goodness, they don’t trouble me, I’ve had them for years, it’s the port here, d’you see, worst port in Oxford, don’t know why I stay. I’ve had splendid offers from all sorts of places, Sussex, Lancaster, Uganda – all sorts of places.’

‘They all sound much the same to me. What, in fact, did prevent you from meeting me?’

‘Oh, I had luncheon at one of those women’s colleges, can’t recall the name, they get you frightfully drunk, you probably know, shocking lot, boozers every one. So I felt a little
tired
after luncheon and Francis hadn’t his essay ready so I offered to let him meet you instead.’

‘Just so,’ I said. (I find that I say ‘just so’ often in Oxford, I wonder why that is?)

He then gave me a
filthy
glass of sherry without a word of apology and led me up to the Warden so that I might pay my respects. I paid them.

‘How nice,’ the Warden said with apparent civility, ‘to see an old member.’

To this day I cannot be sure whether it was a gibe or simply an unfortunate turn of phrase.

I strayed around the Common Room until I found a hideous pot-plant which seemed to deserve my sherry. A moment later, we formed the usual sort of procession and shuffled off to Hall, High Table and dinner. High Table was much as it has always been, except for the cut of the dinner-jackets and the absurd youthfulness of the dons, but a glance over my shoulder into the bear-pit of Hall made me shudder. Two hundred shaggy Tom-a-Bedlams with their
molls and doxies were scrambling and squabbling around a row of stainless-steel soup-kitchen counters, snapping and snarling like Welsh Nationalists in committee, or Italian press-photographers in pursuit of an adulterous Royal. Every few moments one of them would break out of the
mêlée
, guarding a plate heaped with nameless things and chips, which he would savage at the table, cursing and belching the while. The long oak tables bore none of the ancient silver of my youth – they have to keep it locked up nowadays – but there were long, proud lines of bottles of Daddie’s Favourite Sauce – and jolly nice it is too, I dare say. But I turned away with a shudder and dipped a reluctant spoon into the Mock Turtle before me. (You can tell how even the memory of it all upsets me if you note that I started the last sentence with a conjunction, a thing I never do.)

You must not think that I am carping when I say that dinner was five courses of poisonous ordure: I expected it and would have been disturbed if it had been good. High Table dinner in Oxford, as perhaps you know, is always in inverse ratio to the brains-content of the College which offers it. Scone is a very brainy College indeed. If you want a good tuck-in in Oxford you have to go to places like Pembroke, Trinity or St Edmund Hall, where they play rugger and hockey and things like that and, if you’re spotted reading a book, someone takes you aside and has a chat with you.

No, what really spoiled my evening was that Scone had gone in for the ultimate gimmick and acquired a she-don. She resembled nothing so much as a badly-tied bundle of old bits of string; her smile was the bitter, clenched rictus of a woman pretending to enjoy natural childbirth and we disliked each other on sight to our mutual satisfaction. She was not wearing a bust-bodice or ‘bra’, that was clear; her blouse was gallantly taking the strain at about the level of her navel.

I couldn’t say anything, could I – as a mere Old Member I was only a guest and she was listening intently – but I met the Warden’s eye and gave him a long, level look. He smiled sheepishly, a sort of qualified apology.

After dinner, in the Common Room, Dryden mischievously introduced us.

‘Gwladys,’ he said with relish. ‘Charlie Mortdecai has been dying
to meet you.’

‘
Bronwen
,’ she said curtly. Clearly, Dryden had used that gambit before.

‘ Enchanted,’ I exclaimed in the
gallant
voice which I hoped would most enrage her, ‘it’s high time this stuffy old place had a few pretty faces to brighten it up.’

She turned on me that particularly nasty look which your breakfast kipper gives you when you have a hang-over.

‘And what’s your field?’ I asked.

‘Sexual Sociometrics.’

‘I might have guessed,’ I replied archly. She turned away. Never let a day go by without making an enemy, is what I say, even if it’s only a woman.

‘You have made a conquest,’ murmured Dryden in my ear.

‘Have you any whisky in your rooms?’

‘Only Chivas Regal.’

‘Then let us go there.’

His room are the best set in Scone: there are
boiseries
and a pair of bookcases only rivalled by those in the Pepysian Library in Cambridge and a certain house in Sussex, whose name escapes me. Moreover, he has a bathroom of his own, an unheard-of luxury in Scone, where the
corpus sanum
– or
vile
– runs a very bad second to the
mens sana
. (The story goes that, long ago, when it was first proposed in the College
concilium
that bathrooms should be provided for undergraduates, an ancient life-fellow protested in piping tones that the lads couldn’t possibly need such things: ‘Why, they’re only here for eight weeks at a time!’ But then came the strange late-Victorian epoch, shot through with obscure guilts, when the English – whom Erasmus had named as the grubbiest race in Europe – found that nothing would do but that they must scrub themselves from head to foot whenever they could spare a moment from smartening up Fuzzy-Wuzzy and other Breeds Without The Law. There are three times as many undergraduates in Scone now, and the bathrooms are just as few, but now no one seems to mind any more.)

‘Well now,’ said Dryden, when the beaded bubbles of Chivas Regal were winking at the brim, ‘I gather that you have taken up the worship of Wicca and find that it compels you to range around the countryside stealing ducks.’

‘No, no,
no
, John, you must have mis-heard me on the telephone: duck was not the word I used and it’s not me at all, it’s some other chap.’

That’s what they all say,’ kindly, sadly, ‘but tell me all about your, ah,
friend
.’

He was, of course, teasing me, and he knew very well that I knew that he knew that I knew he was, if I make myself clear. I started from the beginning, for I am not skilled in narrative, and went on to the end. It electrified him; he sat up straight and poured profligate drinks for both of us.

‘Well, I do call that splendid,’ he chortled, rubbing his big, pink hands together. (Can you chortle, by the way? I can giggle and snigger but chortling and chuckling are quite out of my range. It’s a dying art, some modern Cecil Sharp should go around recording the last few practitioners.)

‘How do you mean,
splendid
?’ I asked when the chortling was over. ‘My friends and their wives don’t think it’s a bit splendid, I can tell you.’

‘Of course, of course. Forgive me. My heart goes out to them. What I meant was that in the midst of all this bogus satanist revival that’s going on it’s rather gratifying to a scholar that a serious recrudescence of the real tradition is taking place in just the sort of base and backward community where one had hoped the last embers of the Old Religion might, indeed, still be glowing.’ (What lovely sentences he constructs. I wish I could write one half so well as he talks.)

‘Yes,’ he went on, ‘it’s all there: the desecration of Easter for a start. It probably starts at Easter every year, you know, but few victims of ravishment ever complain to the police for reasons which doubtless spring to your mind; the counter-accusations and cross-examinations at the trial can be most shaming in cases of this kind. Moreover, the sturdy native Jersey women would, for the most part, appreciate that they had been singled out for what amounts to a religious rite – it is just as if an Englishwoman were told by the Vicar that it was her turn to do the flowers in Church for Easter: a nuisance but an honour. Do you follow me?’