The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(164)
We did not have much more luck, if that’s a suitable word, from then on. Someone did some peculiarly unpleasant laughing, Eric’s mother came through again in a flurry of animal noises and seemed to accuse him of having practised something which would have brought a blush to the hairy cheeks of old Krafft-Ebing himself (‘She will have her little joke,’ Eric murmured uneasily) and, near the end, a still, small voice delivered a message plainly intended for me, concerning a matter which Eric could not possibly have known about, and with which I do not propose to trouble the reader at this point. Or ever.
Oh, yes, and whenever we hit one particular speed/volume combination an urbane and friendly voice repeatedly said, ‘No, don’t. Don’t. Not tomorrow. No, I really wouldn’t. Not tomorrow. Don’t, please.’
‘All quite fascinating,’ I said heavily when Eric had at last switched everything off. ‘Fascinating. It seems to me, though, that it might not be a good idea to let every Tom, Dick and Harry share this sort of, ah, recondite harmony, perhaps?’
‘Goodness, no. I only do it when I’m alone or with people of quite exceptional emotional stability – like yourself, if I may say so.’
I didn’t – couldn’t – comment on this astonishing assessment of me: I keep my emotional stability and things like that at the bottom of my handkerchief drawer, along with the vibrator and the naughty photographs, as W.H. Auden has probably already said. It was the other part of what he said that drew my fire.
‘Do you mean to say that you sometimes do this sort of thing alone?’ I asked, wonderingly. ‘At night?’
‘Goodness, yes. Often. What have I to be afraid of?’
I didn’t answer that. If he, with his qualifications, didn’t know, it wasn’t my place to tell him. I mean, I wasn’t his bloody Bishop, was I?
He was smart enough, however, to notice that I was becoming moody and he set himself to the task of amusing me, with some success. I yield to few when it comes to telling dirty jokes but it takes a seminary priest to tell a true Catholic story with the right admixture of shyness and authority. He had this art to such a state of perfection that I recall falling about a good deal.
Later, he taught me how to make and drink a ‘nose-dive’ – an art little known outside the campus of the University of Southern California, where Eric had once spent a happy semester teaching the well-nourished undergraduate girls there the full inwardness of Verlaine’s Chansons Pour Elle.
How you drink a ‘nose-dive’ is as follows – you ought to know because it is the only way of gagging down the nastier forms of alcohol, like tequila, pulque, Polish vodka at 149° of proof, paraldehyde and aircraft de-icing fluid. You fill the shot-glass with the desired but normally undrinkable fluid and place the shot-glass inside a high-ball glass, which you then fill, to the level of the shot-glass, with iced orange-juice or some other sharply nourishing fluid. Then you drink it all down as one. The juice, unpolluted with whatever lunatic-soup happens to be in the shot-glass, nevertheless marks its horrors during the progress over your palate. As a bonus, at the end, the adhesion of the inner glass fails and it slides down and bumps you gently on the nose – hence the name of the game. The nose-bumping, I may say, in my experience compels you irresistibly to repeat the process. I have no knowledge of other mixtures but I don’t mind telling you that, practised with Pastis and pineapple-juice, you soon find yourself sitting on the carpet, singing songs you didn’t think you knew the words of.
It seems to me, but I cannot be sure, that Jock entered the room in the small hours and, with many a kindly word, showed Eric where his room was; returning later to take me out to the shrubbery and hold my head, then to the shower-bath. And so, I dare say, to bed.
Anyone will tell you that there’s nothing like Pastis to take one’s mind off the things tape-recorders say to you.
11
Now all strange hours and all strange loves are over,
Dreams and desires and sombre songs and sweet,
Hast thou found place at the great knees and feet
Of some pale Titan-woman like a lover,
Such as thy vision here solicited,
Under the shadow of her fair vast head,
The deep division of prodigious breasts,
The solemn slope of mighty limbs asleep,
The weight of awful tresses that still keep
The savour and shade of old-world pine-forests
Where the wet hill-winds weep?
Ave Atque Vale
For years I had believed that these lines:
‘Shot? So quick, so clean an ending?
Oh that was right, lad, that was brave;
Yours was not an ill for mending,
’Twas best to take it to the grave’
were about a horrified young Edwardian who had discovered that he was a homosexual. I am in a position to correct literary history in this matter. The lines are about a horrified chap in early middle age who has discovered, one morning, that he has no head for Pastis. This, you see, was not the common hangover of commerce, it was a Plague of Egypt with a top-dressing of the Black Death. Quite clearly incurable. I touched the bell.
‘Jock,’ I said hollowly, ‘pray bring me a pot of tea – the Lapsang Souchong Tips I think – and a loaded revolver. Mine is not an ill for mending: I propose to take it to the grave but I wish to blow the top of my head off first. I have no intention of spending eternity with the top of my head in its present condition.’