Husband Material (London Calling #2)(67)

The Earl of Coombecamden nodded graciously. “If you could wrap it up a tad quicker, old boy?”

“I’ll be speaking to your superiors,” Justice Mayhew finished.

And that was it. Oliver had, as always, been right. Whatever the limitations of the British criminal justice system were, they definitely didn’t include a tendency to be overly harsh on people who hung out with landed gentry.

The bus, as it turned out, had been left at the crime scene. Well, the tort scene. Well, the scene of the incident that there’s unlikely to ever be an official record of because we were never formally charged and an angry racist came and told everybody to let us go.

But the police were very nice about it and gave Rhys a lift to pick it up, and then we all got back in and followed the earl to Lettice Manor.

Alex insisted on riding with us, on the basis that it would be “a wheeze”—possibly because he’d never been on a bus before—but it… Well. It wasn’t. Not that we weren’t all pleased and grateful to be out of custody after only a brief stay of several hours, but somehow ending a four-hour drive with half a cup of tea and being arrested hadn’t put many of us in a wheezing mood.

“By the way, Luc,” said Alex, “got a joke for you.”

Really? Was this how my day was going to end? “You’ve got a joke for me?”

“Thought it was about time. Turnabout is fair play and all that.

And actually I’ve done fearfully well out of all the corkers you’ve given me down the years. Told a couple to Miffy when we first met and she absolutely adored them. Told one to the earl when I asked his permission to marry the filly too.”

I wasn’t going to ask which. I wasn’t going to ask which.

“Which?”

“The one about the pieces of tarmac.”

I wasn’t going to ask why. I wasn’t going to ask why. “Why that one?”

“Well, he likes cycling, so he liked that it was about a cycle path.

Had to explain the play on words to him, mind, and he agreed with me that it didn’t work terribly well joke-wise but that no harm had been done and we shouldn’t hold it against you.”

“Oh,” I said. “Thanks?”

“Anyway.” Alex clapped his hands and beamed. “Here’s my joke.” He cleared his throat. “What does a Roman pirate say?”

“I don’t know, Alex.” I thought it only fair that I go through the full joke-recipient routine. “What does a Roman pirate say?”

“Summus.”

Everybody laughed except me. Because I went to a state school.

The annoying thing was I could probably work out why it was supposed to be funny from context. I mean it was a pirate joke.

There’s only two endings to a pirate joke, and one of them is just an attempt to subvert the original ending. Even more annoying was that I was about sixty percent sure that at least one other person in the bus was in the same boat I was but had cruelly abandoned me to be the only one sitting here not laughing like some kind of uneducated, humourless joke pleb. “Rhys,” I asked, “why is that joke funny?”

Still keeping his eyes firmly on the road, Rhys gave another one of those expressive shrugs that let me imagine his face with perfect clarity. “I don’t know, but everybody else was laughing and I thought it’d be nice to join in. Besides, summus is a funny word. Sounds a bit sexual.”

“It does not sound sexual,” I protested. “You can’t say, ‘Baby, I want to summus you. I want to summus you all night long.’”

Ana with one n twisted around to look at me. “You’d be surprised. I get all kinds of weird stuff in my DMs.”

“You know,” I told her, “I don’t think I would be surprised.”

Alex was beginning to look crestfallen. “You didn’t tell me what you thought of my joke.”

I wasn’t sure what to say. “I think I’m not the target audience.”

“Really?” Alex looked perplexed. “It’s very simple. You see summus is the first-person plural of the verb to be—”

“Which means it’s Latin for are,” I replied. “Yeah, I worked that much out for myself..”

“Then why didn’t you laugh?”

Why hadn’t I? I suppose on a meta level I had got the joke.

Fuck, why did every conversation with Alex end with me feeling like I was the one with the problem? “I think…I think to laugh, you need to understand it sort of…sort of instinctively?”

“Ah.” Alex nodded. “Makes sense. Moral of that story is to pay more attention to your Latin master.”

“I didn’t have a Latin master.”

For a moment Alex said nothing, then he laughed more authentically than I’d ever heard him respond to any joke I’d ever told him. “Ah, because the chap was English, you mean. Good one.”

“No, I mean because I didn’t learn… Tell you what, I’ve got a joke for you too.”

Alex sat upright. “Good-oh. Let’s hear it.”

“What’s a pirate’s favourite cheese?”

“I don’t know,” replied Alex dutifully. “What is a pirate’s favourite cheese?”

“Yarrr lsberg.”