The Mortdecai Trilogy (6 page)

I wiggled the finger, resting my nose on the top of the newspaper.

‘Piss off!’ he snarled, scarlet-faced. Better, that.

I pissed off, well pleased with myself. Round the corner of St James’s Street clumped a policeman, one of those young, pink, indignant policemen you meet so often nowadays. Ambitious, virtuous and hell on evil-doers.

‘Officer!’ I gobbled angrily, ‘I have just been obscenely accosted by that wretched fellow with the newspaper.’ I pointed a shaking finger at Maurice who paused guiltily in midstride. The policeman went white about the lips and bore down on Maurice who was still on one foot, newspaper outstretched, looking extraordinarily like a cruel parody of Gilbert’s ‘Eros’ at Piccadilly Circus. (Did you
know that Eros is made of aluminium? I’m sure there’s a moral there somewhere. Or a joke.)

‘I’ll be at your Station in forty minutes,’ I cried after the policeman, and nipped into a passing taxi. It had all its handles.

Now, as I’ve already told you, Martland’s men have a year’s training. Ergo, spotting Maurice so easily had to mean that Maurice was there to be spotted. It took me a long time but I spotted her in the end: a burly, clean-shaven, auntlike woman in a Triumph Herald: an excellent car for tailing people in, unremarkable, easily parked and with a tighter turning circle than a London taxi. It was unfair on her not to have had a companion though. I simply hopped out at Piccadilly Circus, went in one Underground entrance and out of another. Triumph Heralds are not all that easily parkable.

My second taxi took me to Bethnal Green Road, Shoreditch, a wonderful place where all sorts of recondite crafts are plied. Over-tipping the driver, as is my foolish wont, he ‘gave’ me ‘Nostalgia for the fourth at Kempton Park.’ Still wondering what on earth he could mean, I climbed the stairs to my liner’s studio.

Here I’d better explain what a liner is. Most old paintings need a new support before they can be cleaned. In its simplest form, this involves soaking the old canvas with glue, ‘compo’ or wax, then bonding it, so to speak, to a new canvas by means of a hot table and pressure. Sometimes the old canvas is too far gone; sometimes during the work the paint comes adrift (the picture ‘blows up’ as they say). In either of these cases a ‘transfer’ is called for. This means that the painting is fastened face downwards and every shred of canvas is removed from the paint. The new canvas is then stuck on to the back of the paint and your picture is sound again. If it is painted on panel (wood) which has gone rotten or wormy, a really top reliner can plane all the wood off, leaving only the crust of paint, to which he then sticks a canvas. All very, very tricky work and highly paid. A good liner has a pretty shrewd idea of the value of the painting he is treating and usually charges accordingly. He makes more money than many of the dealers he works for. He is indispensable. Any idiot can clean a painting – and many of them do – and most competent artists can strengthen (touch up) or replace missing bits of paint; indeed many famous painters have made a good thing out of this as a secret sideline. (Very delicate work, like the rigging of ships, was often painted with a varnish
medium for easy handling: this is hell to clean because, of course, it comes off with the dirty varnish. Consequently, many cleaners simply photograph the rigging or whatever, ruthlessly clean it off, then repaint it from the photograph. Well, why not?) But a good liner, as I was saying, is a pearl beyond price.

Pete does not look like a pearl. He looks like a dirty and sinister little Welshman, but he has the curiously beautiful manners which even the basest Celt displays in his own home. He opened the ceremonial tin of Spam and brewed a huge metal pot of lovely strong Brooke Bond PG Tips. I hastily volunteered to make the bread and butter – his nails were
filthy
– and to slice the Spam. It was a lovely tea party, I adore Spam, and the tea had condensed milk in it and came out a rich orange colour. (How different, how very different, from the home life of our own dear queen.)

I told him the Spränger would be arriving from Sotheby’s and that I thought the drapery over Venus’s oh-be-joyful was later work and probably concealed a very fair example of the nun’s wink.

‘Scrub,’ I told him, ‘but scrub with care.’

We then repaired to his studio under the roof so that I could inspect work in progress. All very satisfactory. He was having great trouble with my little Sienese tryptich (
is
that how you spell it?) but then he’d been having trouble with it for eighteen months. I never got the bill for it and now I probably never shall.

Then I told him about Mr Spinoza and explained certain new arrangements. He didn’t like them a bit but soon stopped shrieking when I filled his mouth with gold, as it were. He keeps his money in the tea caddy, if you want to know. There was one more ordeal to be undergone before I could get away from his carious, onion-laden breath.

‘Just got time for a tune, then, ain’t I?’ he cried with the coy, treat-giving air of a Quartermaster dishing out prophylactics.

‘Capital, capital,’ I responded, rubbing hypocritical hands. He sat down at his little electric organ (it cost him £400) and treated me to ‘Turn back, oh man, Forswear thy foolish ways’ which moved me deeply. There is something curiously wrong about most Welsh voices, a kind of cardboard quality under the slick of gold, which irks me greatly. Pete’s singing can reduce a public bar full of people to tears of sheer pleasure – I’ve seen it – but it always makes me feel that I’ve eaten too many Spam sandwiches.

I applauded loudly and, since he was particularly indispensable at that juncture, begged humbly for another. He gave me ‘There is a Fountain Filled with Blood,’ which never fails to please. I tottered downstairs and into the street, my bowels heavy with strong tea and foreboding.

The Bethnal Green Road at half past six on a Saturday night is not a
locus classicus
for taxis. In the end I took a bus; the conductor wore a turban and hated me on sight. I could see him memorizing me so that he could go on hating me after I’d got off.

Much depressed, I entered the flat and stood limply while Jock took my hat and coat away from me. He steered me to my favourite chair and brought me a glass of whisky calculated to stun a Clydesdale stallion. I revived enough to play a record of Amelita Galli-Curci singing ‘Un Di Felice’ with Tito Schipa; that reassured me in the
bel canto
department and the rest of the album dissipated most of the foreboding. Bathed and dinner-jacketed, I was in the mood for Wilton’s lovely
art-nouveau
décor and even more in the mood for their Oysters Mornay. I also had a baked custard, a thing I wouldn’t dream of eating anywhere else.

Home again, I was in time for a rattling John Wayne Western on the television, which I let Jock watch with me. We drank a great deal of whisky, for this was Saturday night.

I suppose I went to bed at some stage.

For he ’gins to guess the purpose of the garden,
With the sly mute thing beside, there, for a warden.
What’s the leopard-dog-thing, constant at his side,
A leer and lie in every eye of its obsequious hide?

 

You must have noticed from time to time, self-indulgent reader, that brandy, unless you positively stupefy yourself with it, tends to drive sleep away, rather than induce it. I am told, by those who have drunk it, that with cheap brandy the effect is even more marked. It is otherwise with Scotch whisky; a benign fluid. All credit, I say, to the man who first invented it, be his skin of whatever hue. Indeed, my only quarrel with him is that sixteen fluid ozs of his brainchild, taken orally
per diem
for ten years or so, lessens one’s zest for the primal act. I used to think that my flagging powers were the result of advancing age combining with the ennui natural to an experienced
coureur
, but Jock disabused me. He calls it ‘brewer’s droop’.

Be that as it may, I find that drinking a sound twelve-year-old Scotch in good quantity gives me six hours of flawless slumber, followed by a compulsion to get up in the morning and bustle about. Accordingly, I got up, without the sweet coercion of Bohea, and stamped downstairs, intending to roust Jock out and point out to him the benefits of early rising. To my mild chagrin he was already up and out of the flat, so I made my own breakfast: a bottle of Bass. I can heartily recommend it. I shall not pretend that I would not have
liked a cup of tea, but the truth is that I am a little afraid of these new electric kettles: in my experience they eject their plugs savagely at you while you stand beside them waiting for them to boil.

There is only one thing to do early on a Sunday morning in London and that is to visit Club Row. I tiptoed downstairs so as not to disturb my Madame Defarge and made my way to the mews. All three cars were there but Jock’s huge motorbike, which generates enough power to light a small town, was absent. I gave a whimsical Gallic wink and shrug to a passing cat: Jock was probably in love again, I thought. When chaps like him are in rut they’ll travel miles, you know, escaping from prison first if needs be.

Club Row used to be just a row of shifty chaps selling stolen dogs: nowadays it is an enormous open-air mart. I roved about for an hour but the old magic didn’t work. I bought a disgusting plastic object to tease Jock with – it was called ‘Drat That Dog’ – and drove home, too distraught even to lose my way. I thought of dropping in at Farm Street to catch one of those rattling Jesuit sermons but felt that might be too dangerous in my present mood. The sweet logic and lucidity of high-powered Jesuits works on me like a siren-song and I have a dread that one day I shall be Saved – like a menopausal woman –
how
Mrs Spon would laugh! Do they really wash you in the blood of the lamb or is that only the Salvation Army?

Jock was at home, elaborately unsurprised at my early rising. We did not question each other. While he cooked my breakfast I slipped the ‘Drat That Dog’ into the canary’s cage.

Then I had a little zizz until Martland telephoned.

‘Look, Charlie,’ he quacked, ‘it just isn’t on. I can’t organize all that Diplomatic bit, the Foreign Office told me to go and piss up my kilt.’

I was in no mood to be trifled with by the Martlands of this world.

‘Very well,’ I rapped out crisply, ‘let us forget the whole thing.’ And I hung up. Then I changed my clothes and laid a course for the Café Royal and luncheon.

‘Jock,’ I said as I left, ‘Mr Martland will be telephoning again shortly to say that everything is all right after all. Tell him “all right,” would you. All right?’

‘All right, Mr Charlie.’

The Café Royal was full of people pretending they went there often. I liked my lunch but I forget what it was.

When I got back to the flat Jock told me that Martland had called in person, all the way from what he calls Canonbury, to wrangle with me, but that Jock had turned him away.

‘He bloody near spit on the mat’ was how Jock summed up his parting mood.

I went to bed and read a naughty book until I fell asleep, which was soon. You can’t get good naughty books any more, there aren’t the craftsmen nowadays, you see. Those Swedish ones with coloured photographs are the worst, don’t you think? Like illustrations to a handbook of gynaecology.

Mrs Spon woke me up, charging into my bedroom in a red, wet-look trouser suit; she looked like a washable Scarlet Woman. I hid under the bedclothes until she promised she was only here to play Gin Rummy. She plays a lovely game of Gin but has terrible luck, poor dear; I usually win six or seven pounds off her but then she’s had a
fortune
from me at interior decorating. (It is my invariable practice, when playing Gin Rummy, to leave one card accidentally in the box: it is amazing how much edge you can get from the knowledge that there is, for example, no nine of spades in the pack.)

After a while she complained of the cold as she always does – I will not have central heating, it ruins one’s antique furniture and dries up one’s tubes. So she got into bed beside me, as she always does (look, she must be
sixty
for God’s sake), and we played ‘gotcha’ for a while between hands. Then she rang for Jock who brought a naked sword to put between us and a lot of hot pastrami sandwiches on garlicky bread. We were drinking Valpolicella, hell on the bowels but delicious and so cheap. I won six or seven pounds from her; it was such a lovely evening; tears start to my eyes as I recall it. It is no use treasuring these moments as they occur, it spoils them; they are only for remembering.

When she had gone, after one last ‘gotcha’, Jock brought me my bedtime rations: whisky, milk, chicken sandwiches and aluminium hydroxide for the ulcer.

‘Jock,’ I said, after thanking him civilly, ‘we must do something about nasty Perce, Mr O’Flaherty’s little git.’

‘I already done it, Mr Charlie. ’Smorning, before you was up.’

‘Did you really, Jock? My word, you think of everything. Did you hurt him very much?’

‘Yes, Mr Charlie.’

‘Oh dear. Not …?’

‘Nah. Nuffing that a good dentist couldn’t put right in a coupla munce. And, uh, I don’t reckon he’ll feel like doing any
courting
for a bit, either, see what I mean.’

‘Poor little chap,’ I said.

‘Yeah,’ said Jock. ‘Goodnight, Mr Charlie.’

‘One other thing,’ I said crisply. ‘I am disturbed at the state of hygiene in the canary’s cage. Could you see that it’s cleaned out soon, please?’

‘I already done it, Mr Charlie. While you was out at lunch.’

‘Oh. Everything all right?’

‘Yeah. ’Course.’

‘Oh, well, thanks, Jock. Goodnight.’

I didn’t sleep very well that night.

If either Krampf
or
Gloag had departed from the agreed plan I could have borne it with fortitude, but two idiots in a team of three seemed excessive. I had told Hockbottle Gloag when he first approached me that I had no intention of helping him to blackmail his august Chum – introducing Hockers to Krampf was as far as I was prepared to go. Later, when Krampf had suggested to me that the photograph could be used, not for coarse money squeezing, but for facilitating the export, to him, of hot works of art, I had let him wring from me my slow consent, but only on condition that I should write the script, and play both the lead and the comic relief. But, as Schnozzle Durante never tired of saying, ‘Everybody wants to get in on the act.’ Gloag had already paid the price for this foot-light fever and it looked as though Krampf was at least getting a pro forma invoice.