The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(137)

He thought for a minute or two, or at any rate, he frowned and chewed his lip as he has seen other people do when they were thinking.

‘I can’t ask these Jerseys that sort of stuff. They’d shut up like bloody clams.’

‘Don’t ask them. Tell them. Tell them what you think it’s all about. Talk rubbish while you fill their ale-pots. Then watch: see who smiles. Listen: and see who calls you an idiot. Do not hit them; play the mug, let them pull your plonker. Someone will walk into the trap.’

‘You mean, do a Les Kellet?’

‘Exactly.’

(Les Kellet is a superb wrestler and consummate clown: he seems to stumble about in a happy daze but his stumbles usually occur just when his opponent leaps on him for the coup de grace. He is puzzled and sorry when the opponent shoots through the ropes and lands on his bonce outside the ring. Sometimes he helps the other chap back into the ring, dusts him down, then administers a fearsome forearm smash and the winning pinfall. Sometimes, too, he picks up the referee absent-mindedly and hits the other chap with him. He is very brave and strong and amusing.)

I briefed Jock a little more from the depths of my ignorance and waved him away in the general direction of the tavern doors.

Soon I heard his great motor-bike start up and burble down the lane. I say ‘burble’ because it’s one of those lovely old pre-war Ariel 1,000c.c. machines with four cylinders and Brooklands fishtail exhausts. It is Jock’s pride and joy and I find it utterly terrifying.

The pubs would be open and thronged already, they never seem to close in Jersey. (There are frequent flights from Heathrow; book now to avoid disappointment.) I went back to sleep, secure in the knowledge that the matter of liquoring-up the peasantry was in the hands of a mastercraftsman. Going back to sleep is infinitely sweeter than going to sleep in the first place.

I had scarcely closed my eyes, it seemed, before Johanna aroused me – and I use the word ‘aroused’ with precision. I opened an eye.

‘Have you brought tea?’ I asked.

‘Of course not. You are funny, Charlie.’

‘In that case, NO, and let me remind you of Uncle Fred and Auntie Mabel who fainted at the breakfast-table.’

‘Charlie, it is not the morning, it is past one o’clock. And you don’t eat breakfast, you know you don’t.’

I fled to the shower but I was too slow, she got in as well. We re-enacted the battle of Custer’s Last Stand. Later, I found that it had been only half-past eleven in the morning after all; it’s a poor thing if a chap’s own wife lies to him, don’t you think?

Then she drove us over to Gorey in the East of the Island for a surprise luncheon at ‘The Moorings’ where the shellfish are very good. Johanna kept on looking at me anxiously as though she feared I might faint at table. On the way home, for some obscure, American reason, she stopped to buy me a huge bottle of multi-vitamin pills.

Jock was still out. Johanna and I sat on the lawn in the sun and drank hock and seltzer. She will not usually drink in the afternoons but I explained that it was Oscar Wilde’s birthday and, who knows, it may well have been.

In the evening we went to a dinner-party on the Isle of Alderney, which has been aptly described as 1,500 alcoholics clinging to a rock. It was a delicious dinner but the flight home in Sam’s little Piper was terrifying: he smelled of drink.

Jock was in the kitchen when we returned. He was by no means drunk by his standards but there was a betraying woodenness about his face and gait which suggested that his Jersey chums had not drunk the ten pounds unassisted.

Johanna, who was ‘excused games’ as we used to say at Roedean, went to bed.

‘Well, Jock, any news?’

‘Not really Mr Charlie, but I got a few night-lines laid, you might say. Wasted a bit of time on a bloke who turned out to be a Guernsey: well, I didn’t know, did I?’

‘I believe they wear a different sort of pullover.’

‘Well I’m not a bloody milliner, am I?’

‘No, Jock. Press on.’

‘Well, some of the Jerseys seemed sort of interested and I reckon one or two of them would have opened up a bit if their mates hadn’t bin there. Anyway, I got one of them coming here tomorrow night to play dominoes; I pretended I’d pinched a bottle of your Scotch.’

‘Pretended?’

‘Yeah. Oh, and I took on an old geezer to come and help out in the garden a few hours a week, hope that’s all right. He seemed a right old character, met ’im in the pub at Carrefour Selous, the governor there says the old geezer knows every inch of Jersey and never had a bath in ’is life.’

‘What a splendid chap he must be, I long to meet him. What is that you are eating?’

‘Cormbeef samwidge.’

‘With lots of mustard?’

‘ ’Course.’

‘And thickly-sliced onions, I daresay?’

‘Right.’

‘The bread sounds fresh and crusty.’

‘Oh, all right, let me finish this and I’ll make you one.’

‘How you read my mind!’ I marvelled.

‘Mr Charlie?’

‘Yes, Jock?’

‘What’s a crappo?’

‘I’ve no idea. Why?’

‘Well this Guernsey said it was a matey thing to say to the Jerseys and he put me on to saying it to one of them and the Jersey tried to hit me.’