The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(129)

His clothes are in such quiet good taste that they almost amount to a disguise, a cloak of invisibility, perhaps.

Despite this greyish coloration one somehow knows for certain that, were the Hun or Boche to invade us, George would not only spring capably to arms on the instant but would, without debate or question, assume command by invoking some ancient English password, token or shibboleth which we would all recognize, although hearing it for the first time since King Arthur sank below the waves of that lake near Avalon.

In the meantime, however, here and now in Jersey, one certainly didn’t want not to know him, for he listened to one’s stories; he poured big (but not vulgarly big) drinks; did not smile too unhappily if one swore in front of his wife and, if the party lasted too long for him, he didn’t make going-to-bed noises, he just sort of faded away and re-materialized, one supposes, in his dressing-room.

He drinks quite a lot in a diffident sort of way; there’s no shooting in Jersey, you see, and that makes the winter days rather long unless you happen to be over-sexed.

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?





George’s Wife




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.





Now Sam Davenant




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.)