The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(152)

He chuckled fatly, wheezed, started to cough alarmingly. When he had learned to breathe again I thanked him for his lecturette and reminded him that the subject of my call was yet to be broached.

‘How d’you mean?’ he snorted. ‘Given you enough for a dozen articles.’

‘You have indeed, but I’m not a writer, you know, although I may turn to it if I should ever fall on evil times.’

‘But you are the young feller from the Gazette Diary, aren’t you?’ He was glaring at me with deep suspicion.

‘Good God, no!’ I cried, shocked for the first time today. ‘What a dreadful … ! I’ve never been so … !’

‘Well, who the devil are you, then, and how did you get in here?’

We sorted it out after a while and soon I had wrung from him his slow consent to my having a sight of the abominable Mass.

As I left the Club, I remarked an inky wretch, shaking with alcohol, whining and carneying to the Hall Porter: I wished him joy of his interview.

The Earl’s house was but a step away. It was one of those Belgravian massifs with fronts like old Euston Station. The servants in such houses are still English (where do they find them?) and the step at the front door is so designed that the butler, when he opens the door, looms over you dauntingly. The one who loomed in answer to my ring was a fine, well-grown specimen who had clearly eaten up every scrap of his gruel when he was a nursling butler. His manner was civil, if condescending, but his eye said that he knew all about gents who wanted to read in the master’s library. He stripped me of hat, coat, and umbrella with the ease of a skilled craftsman and led me along a gallery of statuary towards the library. The sculpture was astonishingly fine and of a fruitiness not usually seen outside the rare Supplement to the Museo Borbonico. I could not resist pausing in front of an unusually explicit ‘Leda and the Swan’: I understood at last how the swan had managed the trick. You’d never believe it.

At the end of the gallery there was a sort of vestibule lit only by a concealed ray of light playing on a terminal figure of Pan – the Tree with one Branch – which, as we passed, suddenly became a drinking-fountain in the most dramatic and peculiar way. The butler shunted me into the library, indicated the librarian’s desk and left me to my own devices – or solitary vices, as I dare say he thought. I ambled down an alley of shelves crammed with a bewildering accumulation of priceless, richly-bound filth and rubbish. Nerciat rubbed shoulders with D.H. Lawrence, the Large Paper set of de Sade (Illustrated by Austin Osman Spare) jostled an incunable Hermes Trismegistus, and ten different editions of L’Histoire d’O were piquant bedfellows to De la Bodin’s Démonomanie des Sorciers.

The Earl’s librarian was a pretty slip of a girl with circles under her eyes. She didn’t look as though she got much time for reading.

‘Are you Green Girls in Paris?’ she asked. I thought about it.

‘No, I’m more the Mass of S. Sécaire, really.’

‘Ah, yes. I’ve put it out for you. It’s in a nice plain seventeenth-century cursive without contractions, so you shouldn’t have much trouble. I’ve also put out a plain Latin Missal; it’ll save you a lot of time, you need only copy out the variant passages.’

‘Thanks, you’re very kind.’

‘Not at all. That will be fifty pounds, please.’

‘Fifty pounds? But surely, that’s unheard of between fellow scholars. I mean, common courtesy …’

‘The Earl is not a scholar and common courtesy is outside his sphere of interest. He has just instructed me on the telephone that the fee is fifty pounds and that you have already had – I think he said racing tips – worth more than that.’

I reflected that George and Sam were sharing out-of-pocket expenses so I coughed up, although with ill grace. She wouldn’t accept a Diner’s Club card, she wouldn’t take a cheque, but she would send a footman round to Carlos Place, where squat the proprietors of my overdraft, buttock-deep in pieces-of-eight. The box-office formalities over, I spent a long and disgusting hour or two copying out the relevant passages of the Mass in a silence broken only by the fidgeting and snickering of the man who had arrived to read Green Girls in Paris – an aged person whose thoughts should have been on higher things.

‘Faugh,’ I thought.

Then I had a bath and a few drinks and things at my own club – a temple of light compared with Dunromin’s hell-hole – and flew back to Jersey.

Jock met me at the airport in the ‘Big Jam-Jar’ as he calls the Rolls. The news was not good. Johanna had not been raped but the wife of a friendly doctor, living a mile from us, had. A bogus call to a road-accident had lured her husband away. The rapist had unscrewed the bulb from the light over the porch and rung the door-bell. The other details were as before.

‘And I found out from the new gardener, the old geezer, what this sword on the belly means,’ said Jock.

‘So have I,’ I said. ‘Did he seem to connect it with Easter at all?’

‘Nah. He kept on saying it was because of the Pakis, which is daft, innit, ’cos there’s no Pakis on the Island except them shops in St Helier, where they sell the duty-free watches.’

‘Jock, the French word for Easter is Paques: in the toothless mouth of an ancient Jerseyman it would, indeed, sound just like “Pakis”.’