The Mortdecai Trilogy (41 page)

He scraped a sort of degree at Cambridge and won a boxing blue – one almost says ‘of course’ – and he is knowledgeable about the Napoleonic wars. He is one of those enviable people who – like Balliol men – are serenely certain that what they do and think and are is right. This inability to see any flaws in oneself is a branch of pettiness, of course, but much less harmful than being unable to see any good in oneself.

George cannot quite understand why we gave up India and he is a little puzzled about Suez. He polishes his shoes himself; they are all old, crackled and expensive.

He is, or was, what used to be called a gentleman, or have I said that already?

is called Sonia, although her women-friends say that the name on her birth-certificate was probably Ruby. It is hard to say why she and George married; you sometimes catch them stealing puzzled glances at each other as though they, too, were wondering still.

She is a slut and a bitch, every woman can tell this at a glance, so can most homosexuals. Nice young men can persuade themselves that her languishing glances are for them alone, although they should surely be able to see that her instructions to the gardener about bedding-out are an equally clear invitation to bedding-in. George believes in her, I think, but like Matilda’s aunt, the effort sometimes nearly kills him. She is flashy by nature, choice and art: her eyes are deep blue and enormous, her skin is like magnolia petals and her hair is so black that it seems to be Navy-blue. Her breasts, when they are lugged up and squashed together by her valuable brassière, resemble nothing so much as the bum of a beautiful child, but when she is naked they are lax and unpleasing, the muscle tone long gone. I happen to prefer a breast that I can hold in one hand, don’t you? – but I know that Americans, for instance, prefer quantity, if you’ll forgive the pun.

Under a shellac-layer of cultivation and coffee-table books her manners and morals are those of a skilled whore who has succeeded in retiring early and now dedicates her craft to personal pleasure alone. She is very good at it indeed. I dare say.

While by no means mutton-dressed-as-lamb she is nevertheless subtly wrongly clothed, in that and in one other respect. She wears clothes exactly three years too young for her – never more, never less – and, like those men who contrive always to have two days’ growth of beard – never more, never less – just so she is always expensively dressed in the height of last year’s fashion: never quite up-to-date nor ever quite out of it.

This of course pleases her women friends mightily, although their menfolk do not twig and are in any case more concerned with admiring Sonia’s teats.

She is, of course, an accomplished liar but then they all are, aren’t they? (Or aren’t you married?) George is quite clever enough to detect her in her falsehoods but both breeding and common-sense forbid this in him.

Sonia and George have two sons. One of them, very clever, is serving out the last of his stretch at a school called Wellington; Sonia does not mind having a son at school – although she manages to give the impression that he is at
prep
school – but she is a little cross at the existence of the other son who is what is called grown-up. He is marvellously stupid and drives a helicopter for the Army or Navy or some such out-dated nonsense. He is always breaking their valuable aircraft but his superiors never seem to mind, they just buy him a new one. They don’t pay for it themselves, you see. You do.

and straight away we detect a falsehood, an affectation, for no one has been christened Sam for a hundred years. His real name is Sacheverell, of course. At school he would have died rather than divulge this but nowadays he quite likes one to find out.

He affects to be affected, which he is otherwise not, if you see what I mean, and hopes that his chief fault, congenital idleness or
accidie
, will pass as an affectation. His infrequent swings to the manic phase, made much of, help him to carry this off.

He would think shame to be seen out of bed before noon – unless
he had been up all night – and has eaten no breakfast for twenty years.

He is almost tiresomely well-read. In public he is usually immersed in a trashy paper-back but it is quite certain that in his bedroom he reads Gibbon, Fénelon, Horace and ‘
tous ces defunts cockolores
’. On the other hand, he stoutly denies that he has ever heard of Marcuse and Borges, whoever they may be. (For my part, I adamantly believe in teaching Fénelon, Racine, Milton and Gibbon to the young as soon as may be; you cannot learn too early in life that most classical literature is both dull and unimportant.)

Sam is absurdly kind, easy-going, tolerant and has a harsh word for no one, but I have long recognized in him an insane iron core which would make him, if ultimately provoked, a very bad enemy indeed. He used to play backgammon uncommonly well until the sparks took it up, whereupon he dropped it; he’s like that. I can sometimes beat him at poker.

He seems to be quite rich in a vague sort of way but no one knows how or whence. He hints naughtily at gun-running or worse in his youth – perhaps white-slaving – but I suspect a string of dry-cleaning shops in Northern Ireland: why else should he be so vexed about the news of bomb-outrages in Belfast?

He is tall, pale, curly-haired, thickening a little and a trifle older than me. Let us say fifty.

his wife is tiny, sweet, silly and called Violet, if you’ll believe it. Sam calls her The Shrinker. She does, indeed, shrink from most things; I’ve watched her often. Sam treats her with amused tolerance but secretly adores her, if I may quote from the women’s weeklies. She is nervously vulnerable and can blush and even faint, just as they used to in the olden days.

On rare occasions she is an inspired cook but most of the time she burns or otherwise ruins food but, luckily, Sam is not greedy and can cook. I must not pretend to any knowledge of their nuptial relationships but I should think on the whole probably not. He treats her with a courtesy so elaborate that you might be forgiven for thinking that he hated her, but you would be wrong.

There is something vaguely mysterious about Violet’s mother who is always referred to as ‘poor mummy’. She is, I suppose, either potty or an alcoholic or kleptomaniac or some such nonsense and there are times when I wonder a little about Violet herself: her verbal habits are odd and she tends to say things like ‘rabbits breed like hot cakes’.

this is the narrator, or, if you’ll pardon the accidence, me. My name is Charlie Mortdecai (I was actually
christened
Charlie: I think my mother was subtly getting at my father) and I’m a Honble because my father used to be – and my brother (God rot his soul) is – a Baron, which is a kind of failed Viscount, you might say, if you cared about that sort of nonsense. As my father did.

For the time being I live just a few furlongs across the fields from the two houses in half of a lovely mansion (a mansion, according to estate agents and other housemongers, is a house with two staircases) called Wutherings with my absurdly beautiful new Austrian-Jewish-American wife, Johanna, and my equally unbelievable one-eyed, one-fanged thug, Jock. (I’m by way of being an art-dealer, you see, which is why I have to keep a thug.) I’m not here permanently; I haven’t enough money to make it worth while dodging taxes and my wife has too much of it to bother. I really live in London but, although I’m not exactly
persona non grata
there, a particular branch of the police sort of prefers me to live outside the place for a while. You wouldn’t be interested in the reason and there’s nothing in the fine print that says I can’t be a little shady, is there?

Nor would you be interested in my reasons for having married Johanna, suffice it to say that it was not for her money. She loves me fiercely, for reasons which are a mystery to me, and I have come to like her very much. We don’t understand each other in the least, which is probably a good thing, but we agree fervently that Mozart is marvellous and Wagner vulgar. She doesn’t care to talk very much, which is the prime ingredient for a happy marriage: in Runyon’s deathless words – ‘Naturally, a doll who is willing to listen instead of wishing to gab herself is bound to be popular because if there is anything most citizens hate and despise it is a gabby doll.’
In any case, we are, in an important sense, worlds apart for she is devoted to the game of Contract Bridge – a kind of lunatic whist – whilst I dearly love Gin Rummy which Johanna loathes because it is too utterly simple-minded and perhaps because I always win. She really is quite astonishingly beautiful
^*
but too well-bred to flutter her eyelashes at other men. We never quarrel; the nearest we ever got to it was once, when I was being intolerable: she quietly said, ‘Charlie dear, which of us shall leave the room?’

All three of our houses stand in the parish of S. Magloire, the smallest parish in Jersey. It is wedged between S. Jean and Trinity and has a short coastline of its own at Belle Etoile Bay – just East – or is it West? – of Bonne Nuit Bay. Such pretty names, I always think.

And Pan by noon and Bacchus by night,
Fleeter of foot than the fleet-foot kid,
Follows with dancing and fills with delight
The Mænad and the Bassarid;
And soft as lips that laugh and hide
The laughing leaves of the trees divide,
And screen from seeing and leave in sight
The god pursuing, the maiden hid.

 

Atalanta in Calydon

 

It all started – or at any rate the narrative I have to offer all started – at Easter last year: that season when we remind each other of the judicial murder of a Jewish revolutionary two thousand years ago by distributing chocolate eggs to the children of people we dislike.

I had been in a vile temper all day and had cursed Jock roundly. He knew very well that it was only because there had been no newspapers and hence no
Times
crossword, but for reasons of his own he had chosen to sulk. When I asked what was for dinner he pointed out smugly that gentlemen’s menservants always have the day off on Easter Monday and, indeed, those with thoughtful masters were often given the whole week-end.

I explained to him kindly that he was not a proper manservant, trained to gentlemen’s service, but only a mere thug and that I had noticed lately that he was getting notions above his station in life.

His answer was in the plural – and they bounce.

Shaking with rage at having nursed such a viper in my bosom, I huddled on some clothes and drove off to get dinner in St Helier, my tyres cutting up the gravel savagely and spraying it on to the lawn. (The gardener had, in any case, been making grumbling noises for weeks and I would be well shot of him: his snail-like working pace had earned him the sobriquet ‘Flash’ from Johanna.)

In St Helier, the restaurant I had readied my gastric juices for was, of course, closed. It wasn’t just Easter Bunny time, it was That Kind of Day, too. That did it. Stomach churning with chagrin and thwarted peptins, I went to the Club, determined to spite myself with cold steak-and-kidney pie and spurious new potatoes forced into pallid maturity in Cyprus with doses of chicken-crut and peasants’ pee.

On the steps I met George, coming down.

‘Eaten already?’ I asked.

‘No. Looked at the menu. A shop-girl would eat any quantity of it. I’m off. Come back with me and play backgammon. There’s half a duck in the fridge if the maid hasn’t swiped it. And you could make one of your potato salads. And I’d open a bottle of that Fleurie you like so much.’

It was a deal. Off we sped, he in his Rover, I in my absurd Mini GT which I bought because I can never resist a contradiction in terms.

As we swung into the courtyard and George killed the engine I heard the screams. He didn’t hear them until he’d opened the door of his better-insulated car, so I was first at the door, which was locked. He stabbed it with his key and was through the hall and up the stairs before I had recovered from the mighty shove he had given me.

In the bedroom was his wife, quite bare, legs spread wide and shrieking as though she were approaching a grade on the Atcheson, Topeka and Santa Fé Railroad, Inc.

I couldn’t help noticing that her bush, contrary to the usual practice, was of a lighter shade than the hair of her head. The window was open wide and a warm wind stirred the curtains but the room was fragrant with sex. George was already out of the window and taking a grip of the creeper on the wall outside. It ripped loose under his weight and he landed on the gravel below
with what I suppose I may as well call a sickening thud and an oath more suitable to the Sergeants’ Mess than to his own station in life.

Sonia left off shrieking, pulled a rumpled sheet over her rumpled charms and started concentrating on tragic expressions and ugly gulping noises. I studied her curiously. It was an act, but then she was a woman, so she wasn’t necessarily acting, if you follow me. I had never before observed the behaviour-pattern of a recent rape-victim (I can’t say
rapée
, can I – it reminds one of that delicious Rapée Morvandelle that one puts into
quiches
.) (It’s also a kind of snuff, isn’t it?) nor had I any preconceptions as to how such a victim would react, but somehow I found the performance unsatisfying; suspension of disbelief wouldn’t quite come. However, there was no time to waste. I had no intention, I need scarcely say, of following George and the rapist out of the window: I am a little portly just at present and I was wearing a new and costly mohair suit, but I felt that something should be done and I felt, too, a little
de trop
in that bedroom.

‘There, there,’ I said, patting what I took to be her shoulder under the sheet but which proved, embarrassingly, to be what pornographers call a
quivering mound
and she began to steam-whistle again.

‘Oops, sorry,’ I mumbled as I fled, my carefully-built reputation for being
uno di quelli
shattered.

Downstairs and out through the back door, there was nothing to be seen but the ambiguous outlines of costly shrubs, no smell but the drowsy odours of night-scented whatever-they-ares and no sound but the growling of my still unfilled belly.

George might be anywhere, the rapist still more so, if his exploits had left him with any strength.

‘Chemise de femme,
Annure ad hoc
Pour la gaie prise
Et la belle choque’

 

was running through my head. Sonia’s nightdress, the short sort, calculated for sea-level, had been on the floor, you see, suggesting a leisurely and fastidious rapist.

There was nothing to be done out there in the garden; dirty fighting is one of my favourite outdoor sports, believe it or not, but
I do like a little advantage – umbrageous shrubberies bulging with mad rapists are not my notion of advantageous ground. I attribute my long life and good health to cowardice.

I went indoors and lifted the telephone. Then I put it down again. Sonia might not
want
a doctor; probably a bidet and a codeine tablet would fill the bill, if I may coin a phrase. George might not
want
the police or any other third party to learn of the invasion of his wife’s secret garden.

What I did was, I made a stiff drink of gin and orange juice and tonic, such as I knew Sonia loved, and carried it up to the bedroom, administering it with many a ‘there, there, child’. Then I went downstairs and made a similar confection for myself, except that it was made of whisky and soda. Then I had another which tasted even better and gave me enough lightning-like decision to go across the courtyard and find Sam.

‘Sam,’ I said, when he answered my knock, ‘there is trouble across the way.’

‘Only trouble?’ he said. ‘It sounded like a steam traction-engine rally. I nearly went over but I thought it impertinent to interfere in what might be a private argument.’

I outlined the situation to him and he went to fetch Violet from the other end of the house. Her face was red and tear-stained and I cocked an inquiring eyebrow,

‘It’s all right,’ she said, ‘it’s just the crabs.’

‘The
crabs
?’ I cried, shocked by such candour. ‘My dear, however did you catch
them
?’

‘I didn’t. The plumber did.’

‘You are weeping because the plumber has contracted crabs?’

Sam would ordinarily have let this go on, relishing Violet’s tangled thought-patterns, but time pressed.

‘The plumber,’ he explained, ‘is a keen sea-fisher, as they all are here. He has today given us two fine shanker crabs, alive alive-oh. Violet is boiling them and the sound of their knocking on the saucepan-lid fills her with compassion.
Hinc illae lackry-mae
.’

Violet smiled sweetly, vacantly, through her tears.

A minute later we were at Les Cherche-fuites, where all was going as merrily as a wedding-bell. George was covered with mud, bits of wistaria and gravel-rash, and was making grating, brigadier-like noises into the telephone. Sonia was striking well-raped attitudes
reminiscent of Emma Hamilton portraying Lucrece, and was fetching huge and unbecoming sobs up from deep in her thorax. Violet rushed to her and went into the ‘there, there’ and ‘now, now’ routine but to no avail, for Sonia merely shifted into the higher register. Violet steered her firmly off to the bathroom to wash her face or whatever women do for each other in times of stress.

George subsided into an armchair, glaring at the tumbler of Scotch I had pressed into his hand.

‘Bloody swine,’ he growled. ‘Raped my wife. Ruined my wistaria.’

‘I’ll send my man round first thing in the morning to have a look at it,’ said Sam. ‘The wistaria I mean. They’re very tenacious things – soon recover. Wistaria,’ he added; gratuitously, it seemed to me.

I started to tiptoe out: I love dramas but I am no sort of horticulturalist.

‘Don’t go,’ said George.

‘No, don’t go,’ said Sam.

I didn’t go, I hadn’t really wanted to. I wondered whether George had forgotten about the half of a cold duck and bottle of Fleurie. I helped myself to a little more of his Scotch.

‘Who were you telephoning, George?’ asked Sam.

‘Doctor.’

‘Wise, d’you think? Bit shaming for Sonia?’

‘Irrelevant. Bastard may have damaged her insides, given her some filthy disease, even a brat … God knows …’ His voice trailed off into a choking, hate-filled silence.

‘What I have to decide,’ he went on quietly, ‘is police or not.’

That was, indeed, a matter for thought. Even the Paid Police, if they could eventually be coaxed out from St Helier, could hardly be expected to make much of a possible footprint or two and a ravished wife’s incoherent babblings, while the Honorary Police, in the person of the local Vingtenier, pillar of the community though he might be, could do little more than search his brain for known or likely rapists in his twenty families (excluding those to whom he was related, which would rule out most) and then summon his Centenier. The Centenier, excellent and astute man, could do little more than search
his
brain: his appointment and specialized training were approximately those of the Chairman of a Parish Council in England and he had neither the equipment, the men, nor the
skills necessary to carry out a drag-net operation or house-to-house search. And what to look for in such a search? Someone breathing hard? Worst of all, such a public fuss would stamp Sonia for ever as the ‘poor lady what got raped last Easter’.

‘On the whole,’ said Sam gently, ‘I’d think not.’

‘Yes,’ I said with my customary ambiguity.

‘I see all that,’ said George, ‘and obviously I agree with it. But there is a citizen’s duty. Personal embarrassment shouldn’t count. It’s the law, d’you see. Much more important than us. Even if it is an ass. Otherwise where are we?’

‘But if we know it can’t help?’ (Sam)

‘Well, yes, that’s the point, isn’t it?’ He thought for a while, ignoring the drink in his hand.

‘Yes, got it,’ he said at length, ‘I hold the Queen’s commission and in any case there’s that citizen’s arrest law, isn’t there. I’ll have a private chat with the Centenier tomorrow, explain my position. Then we three form a
posse comitatus
; hound the swine down. Yes, that’s it. Good night, you men. Report here at noon tomorrow. Bring your own sandwiches.’

Sam gazed at him aghast: Nature had not formed him to be a posse-member.

I, too, gazed at him aghast: there was clearly not going to be any cold duck that night.

Violet entered, weeping freely again.

‘It is really quite dreadful,’ she said, ‘poor dear girl. He did
very
odd things to her as well as, well, you know, and she is frightened out of her wits. He must have been a maniac, he was wearing a mask and funny-smelling clothes, and, oh yes, he had a sword painted on his tummy.’

George growled and cursed a bit; Sam’s eyebrows shot up and I began to muse furiously.

‘Bloody bastard,’ said George.

‘How perfectly extraordinary,’ said Sam.

‘What kind of a mask?’ I asked.

The others looked at me, a touch of rebuke in their eyes, as though I had said ‘District Nurse’ in front of the children.

‘One of those joke-shop rubber masks, she thinks. You know, Dracula or the Beast from 5,000 Fathoms.’

‘Just so,’ I said. ‘The Beast.’

‘Aha! said Sam. ‘I think I twig. But the sword thing is new, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, but I think it fits.’

‘How?’

‘Not sure enough now, tell you some other time.’

‘Would somebody mind telling
me
,’ snarled George, ‘what the f – ’ he paused, collected himself. ‘Sorry,’ he resumed, ‘I mean, I don’t quite follow you men.’

‘The Beast of Jersey,’ Sam explained. ‘You know, the chap who terrorized the Island for a dozen years; used to creep into children’s rooms, carry them out of the window, do odd things to them in the fields – not always very nasty – then pop them back into their little beds. The police think that there may have been more than a hundred such assaults but naturally most of them were not reported, for reasons which you will, um, appreciate. He used to wear a rubber mask, most of the victims said that he had an odd smell and he wore bizarre clothes, studded with nails. Just before you moved here they caught a chap called Paisnel, who is now serving thirty years, rightly or wrongly.’

‘Shouldn’t like to be him,’ I interjected, ‘convicts are madly sentimental and they do
beastly
things to offenders against children. Make them sing alto, see what I mean.’

‘Yes. I dare say they do. No experience in that field myself. Take your word for it.’

That was cheaper than Sam’s usual level of badinage; I made a mental note to see that he suffered for it. I’m not a vengeful chap but I can’t allow my friends to make cheap witticisms, can I? It’s a question of the quality of life.

‘What was interesting,’ Sam went on as I chewed my spleen, ‘was that Paisnel kept on saying that it was ‘all part of something’ but he wouldn’t say what and he said that when he was arrested he was on his way to meet “certain people” but he wouldn’t say whom.’