The Mortdecai Trilogy (20 page)

‘Come along,’ he said cordially, ‘let’s see what we can rustle up.’

We rustled up everything in the end, although I had to remind him where some of the things were kept. I also took the Lake District sheet of the one-inch Ordnance Survey map to add colour to my fibs and two bottles of Black Label whisky.

‘Thought you’d given it up, dear boy?’

‘This is just for washing wounds out with,’ I explained courteously.

I also took a bottle of turpentine. You, shrewd reader, will have guessed why, but he was mystified.

‘Look,’ I said as he let me out, ‘please don’t tell anyone,
anyone
, that I’ve been here, or where I’m going, will you?’

‘Of course not,’ he said warmly, looking me straight in the eye to show me his falseness. I waited.

‘And Charlie …’

‘Yes,’ I said, face blank.

‘Do remember, you always have a home here.’

‘Thanks, old chap,’ I replied gruffly.

As Hemingway says somewhere: even when you have learned not to answer letters, families have many ways of being dangerous.

Topheavy with my load of Boy-Scout dunnage, I pedalled erratically to the cemetery, then down Bottom’s Lane, turned left at the Green and skirted Leighton Moss until I came to Crag Foot. I pushed the machine very quietly past the farm for fear of dogs and threaded my way up the broken road to the Crag.

The Crag is a sort of crag-shaped feature of limestone, rich in minerals and seamed with crevasses or ‘grikes’ as they call them hereabouts. It is a mile square on the map (SD 47:49,73) but it seems a great deal larger when you are trying to pick your way over it. Here, two hundred years ago, hoved the dreaded Three Fingered Jack, conning the Marsh with his spy-glass for unprotected travellers whose bones now lie full fathom five, enriching the greedy sands of Morecambe Bay. (Oh Jock – ‘never shake thy gory locks at me!’)

The Crag is riddled and pitted with holes of every sort, the Dog Hole, Fairy Hole, Badger Hole – all of which have given up ancient
bones and implements – and forgotten shafts where minerals were dug in the vague past, and the foundations of immeasurably old stone huts and, highest of all, defence works made by the Ancient Britons themselves. It’s a wonderful place for breaking a leg, even the poachers won’t risk it at night. In front are the salt marshes and the sea, behind stands the Gothick beauty of Leighton Hall. To the right you can look down over the reedy haven of Leighton Moss and to your left there is the desolation of Carnforth.

Copper was the great thing to mine for here, long ago, but what I was aiming for was a certain paint mine. A red-oxide working, to be exact. Red-oxide or ruddle-mining was a thriving industry on the Crag once upon a time and the deserted shafts still weep a messy redness, the colour of a really vulgar Swiss sunset. It took me an hour to find the shaft I remembered best; it goes down steeply for ten feet, looking very wet and red, but then flattens out, turns right at an acute angle and becomes quite dry and airy. A friendly bramble now cloaks its entrance, I had the devil of a job fighting my way in.

So, I soberly laid my last plan
To extinguish the man.
Round his creep-hole, with never a break
Ran my fires for his sake;
Over-head, did my thunder combine
With my under-ground mine:
Till I looked from my labour content
To enjoy the event.

 

Instans Tyrannus

 

‘Playing it pear-shaped’ was a favourite expression of Jock’s; it seemed to mean deftly turning a situation to one’s own advantage; seizing a favorable opportunity: Boxing Clever.

So the new, resourceful,
pear-shaped
Mortdecai arose at noon and brewed his own tea today over a little butane camping stove. Quite successfully. How about that, Kit Carson? Move over, Jim Bridger!

As I sipped it I tried to think the situation over carefully, examining it for neglected apertures, but to little avail – noon on Sunday has a special significance for some of us, you know; it is the time when the pubs open. The thought of all those happy drinkers bellying up to the bar counters in Silverdale and Warton
kept driving all pear-shaped considerations out of my head. True, there was whisky, but noon on the Sabbath is sacred to bottled beer. I
wanted
some.

There hasn’t been a soul on the Crag all day; I can’t understand how people can frowst in public houses drinking bottled beer when there’s all this splendid fresh air and scenery to be had for nothing. Even the campers, whose lurid tents and tasteful pastel caravans pimple the landscape here and there like dragon’s teeth, are not in evidence: they’re probably leading the simple life in front of their portable tellies, watching a nature programme, bless them. Most of them will be back in Bradford tomorrow, glowing with virtue and comparing mosquito bites.

I have taken the bicycle to pieces and wangled it all down into the cave. I’ve also been down to the icy spring which runs in a miniature canyon between two huge slabs of limestone; I washed myself all over, squeaking with the cold, and even drank a little of the water. It was delicious but I had to drink some Black Label when I got back up here, to take the taste away. It would never do to take up hydropathy at my age. Hydrophobia, yes, perhaps.

There is a most inaccessible spot above the mine where no one can creep up on you and I have built a small, discreet camp fire on which a can of baked beans is warming. From where I sit I can see the long necklace of Morecambe’s lights – ‘the bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there’.

I like the ‘wet and wilderness, weeds’ of this place very much. It is quiet and no one has been near. I have been sleeping very happily, dreaming innocent dreams, listening to the sweet wild call of the redshanks whenever I wake. Now more than ever seems it sweet to die; the grave cannot be darker nor more solitary than this: nor stiller except when the wind, stirring the brambles at the entrance furtively, tries to frighten me. I recall the only really poignant ghost story –

(
Sexton:
‘What are you a-sniggering at?’
Ghost:
‘It’s not funny enough for two.’)

 

I saw a marsh-harrier this morning; it quartered the reed beds of the Moss for a time, then flew strongly across Slackwood Farm to vanish in Fleagarth Wood. There’s a new tent in Fleagarth, the first I’ve seen there; it’s the usual awful fluorescent orange – when I was a boy tents were of proper colours, khaki or white or green. I studied the unsuspecting simple-lifers through my bird-watching binoculars – 8.5 × 44 Audubons – they seem to be a fat-bummed father, a rangy, muscular mum and a long, lean, grown-up son. I wish them joy of their late holiday, for it has started to rain in a subdued, determined sort of way. Lord Alvanley used to say that his greatest pleasure was to sit in the window of his club and ‘watch it rain on the damned people’.

I am simmering a tin of frankfurter sausages on my little butane stove. I have some sliced plastic bread to clothe them in but I wish I had thought to bring mustard and bottled beer. Still, appetite and fresh air make a fine relish: I shall eat like a Boy Scout. ‘Palate, the hutch of tasty lust, Desire not to be rinsed with wine.’

I have been very abstemious with the whisky: I still have one and a quarter bottles of the lovely bully; when these are gone I shall have to sally forth and restock. Food is running short: I have two large cans of beans, one ditto of corned beef, a third of a sliced loaf and five rashers of bacon. (I must eat those raw: the smell of frying bacon carries for miles, did you know?) The local magnates, I fear, are going to lose a pheasant or two in the near future; they are still quite tame for they have not been shot at yet. The pheasants, I mean, not the magnates. I dread the thought of plucking and dressing them – again I mean the pheasants – I used not to mind but my stomach is more tremulous nowadays. Perhaps I shall simply emulate Nebuchadnezzar, that princely poephage, and
graze
. (Now, here’s the
good
news: there’s plenty of it.)

After my icy morning wash I have climbed circuitously to the highest point of the Crag, marked FORT on the map. Far below
me I can see the gamekeeper’s Landrover bouncing and splashing along the half-flooded causeway towards his release pens on the near side of the Moss, and the RSPB warden pottering about usefully in a boat on the Scrape. People often marvel at the existence of a successful bird sanctuary in a shooting preserve but there is no real paradox: what better place for a shy bird to breed than a well-keepered shoot? Shooting only takes place long after the breeding season, after all, and serious sportsmen – nearly all good naturalists – would no more shoot a rare bird than their own wives. All right, perhaps they do sometimes shoot a rarity by accident, but then we sometimes shoot our own wives, on purpose, don’t we?

I am looking on this skulking period as a kind of holiday and I’m sure it’s doing me a power of good. With any luck my ill-wishers are miles away, combing the Lake District for me and terrorizing the campers there. Indeed, they may have decided that I died with Jock; they may all have gone home. If I only had a few bottles of beer I would be feeling positively serene.

I have been
lulling
myself again.

I made my usual binocular survey ten minutes ago, before venturing forth to the little deserted vertical shaft which I have been using as a lavatory. The Fleagarth tent was apparently deserted; probably, I thought, they were all inside playing cosy games. (Incest – The Game That All the Family Enjoys?) I had crept to within thirty yards of the natural latrine before I smelled the sweet, chocolatey smell of American pipe tobacco. Parting the brambles I saw, standing with his back to me, the form of a long, lean young man, apparently using
my
privy. He was not in fact using it; just looking. He went on looking. He had an American haircut and wore those unbecoming Bermuda shorts. I didn’t wait for him to turn around – I never could tell one young American from another – I just eased gently backwards and stole silently back here to my paint mine.

I am sure he is one of the Fleagarth campers: what can he have been doing? Perhaps he is a geologist, perhaps an inefficient badger-watcher, perhaps just an idiot; but the deep, sickening sensation in my belly will not be assuaged by these hypotheses. My belly is
convinced that Fleagarth holds an anti-Mortdecai squad. Idle to wonder which lot they are – I can think of very few people who are not anti-Mortdecai this week.

‘Finish, good lady, the bright day is done
And we are for the dark.’

 

This is it, or that is that; slice it where you will, the game’s up. For several minutes just now I had the whole Fleagarth Mob in my field-glasses through a gap in the bramble defences. The thin American – whose shoulders are broader every time I study him – is perhaps one of the Smith and Jones comedy act I met in the sheriff’s office in New Mexico; perhaps he is Colonel Blucher; it doesn’t matter, probably their own mummies couldn’t tell them apart. The burly female part of the sketch I seem to know, I fancy I last saw her fuming in a Triumph Herald at Piccadilly Circus,
you
remember. From the way she handles herself I’d say she was past child bearing but not past entering Judoka contests at Black Belt level.

Grow old along with me – if you’re quick – for the best is yet to be. The
tertium quid
, the fat-bummed daddy-figure is – oh, you’ve guessed it – yes; Martland. Excepting myself, I’ve never seen anyone more ripe for death. Why I should hate him so much I cannot understand, he has never done me any serious harm; yet.

My recce this afternoon didn’t get very far; before I parted my
porte-cochère
of bramble I heard the sound of water buffaloes tromping through a swamp: it was Martland himself, on all fours, being a Woodcraft Indian, looking for
spoor
. Back I slunk, mustering a faint giggle. I could have shot him there and then, I nearly did. I could scarcely have missed the pungent, powdered division of his suety nates as he bent over – he’s going to get it in the end, why not that end? Take, oh take those hips away, that so sweetly were forsworn at Hailsham College for the Sons of Officers, and elsewhere.

But I am saving powder and shot for when – if – they find my
creep-hole; this Smith and Wesson discharged in a narrow mine-shaft will sound enough like a poacher’s twelve-bore to bring the keeper and his two-fisted mates running: I wouldn’t give anything for Martland & Co’s chances against a determined keeper at this time of the year. Poor Martland, he hasn’t tackled anything rougher than a traffic warden since the War.

They are all supping cocoa or something around a wet and smokey woodfire outside their tent in Fleagarth: I have studied them carefully through the glasses and there is positively no deception.

Well, yes.

Just.

My manuscript, interlarded with useful currency notes, lies in the bowels of a Warton pillar box, en route for La Maison Spon. I wonder whose eyes will read these last jottings, whose scissors trim away which indiscretions, whose hand strike the match to burn them? Perhaps only your eyes, Blucher. Not yours, I hope, Martland, for I intend that you shall accompany me down to wherever naughty art dealers go when they die. And I shall not let you hold my hand.

They were all out on the Crag in the dark when I returned from Warton; it was a nightmare. For them too, I imagine. I have only a confused memory of creeping and quaking, stalking and counter-stalking, straining aching ears into the blackness and hearing more sounds than there were; finally, the mindless panic of knowing that I was lost.

I regrouped my mental forces – sadly depleted – and forced myself to crouch in a hole until I could orient myself and calm the jam session of my nerves. I had almost succeeded in becoming Major the Honble Dashwood ‘Mad Jack’ Mortdecai, V.D. and Scar, the ice-cool toast of the Ypres Salient, when a voice close beside me said,

‘Charlie?’

I vomited up my heart, bit it savagely and swallowed it again. My eyes were shut fast, waiting for the shot.

‘No,’ came a whisper from behind me, ‘it’s me.’ My heart shook itself, tried a tentative beat or two, settled into some sort of
ragged rhythm. Martland and the woman rustled about a bit then floundered quietly down the slope.

Where was the American? He was at my lavatory again, that’s where he was. Probably booby-trapping it. I think he heard me coming, for all movement stopped. I lowered myself to the ground with infinite caution and could see him, eight feet tall against the sky. He took a noiseless step toward me, then another. To my surprise I was now quite calm, the wanky old avenger preparing to kill his man. My pistol was in the paint mine – just as well, perhaps. First, kick in the family jewels, I decided; second, leg-sweep behind knees; third, bounce rock on head until tender. If no rock, drop knee on face, break hyoid bone in throat with side of hand. Should serve. I began positively to look forward to his next step, although I am not a violent man by nature.

He took the next step – a cock pheasant exploded from under his feet with all the racket and drama of, well, of a rocketing cock pheasant. Now, one of the few things which do not startle old country-bred Mortdecai is a rocketing pheasant, but it was not so with the American; he squeaked, jumped, ducked, crouched and dragged out a great long thing which can only have been an automatic with a silencer fitted. As the shards of silence reassembled themselves I could hear him panting painfully in the dark. At last he rose, tucked the pistol away and drifted off down the slope, thoroughly ashamed of himself, I hope.

I had to come back here to the mine; pistol, food, suitcase and bicycle were and are all here: I need them all except, perhaps, the bicycle.

There is a safe and smelly snugness about this little grave already: I can scarcely hope that they will not nose me out but they cannot, after all, put me further underground than this. There’s a Stalingrad for all of us somewhere.

‘Ici gît qui, pour avoir trop aimer les gaupes,
Descendit, jeune encore, au royaume des taupes.’

 

In any case, to run now would be to die sooner, in some spot of their choosing and in some way I might not much like. I prefer it here, where I dreamed the dreams of youth and, later, lifted many a lawless leg – to use the words of R. Burns (1759–96).