The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(130)

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.





On the Other Hand




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’.





And Now, For My Last Trick




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.





2





And Pan by noon and Bacchus by night,

Fleeter of foot than the fleet-foot kid,

Follows with dancing and fills with delight

The M?nad 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.