The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(180)

I couldn’t grit my teeth while he cut a channel from the head of the nail to the edge of my ear, because my teeth wouldn’t meet but I remember weeping copiously. He asked me to move my head. No good: the bit of gristle under the head of the nail held fast. There was a long pause then, to my horror, I felt the point of his knife against the corner of my eye. I wrenched away convulsively and screamed as the ear came free.

‘Sorry, Mr Charlie,’ he said as he gathered me up from the kindly mud.

The next time I woke up, Jock was dragging me out of the car and into the Emergency part of the General Hospital in St Helier. He propped me up against the counter, where a kindly but stern lady was making tut-tutting noises at me. She handed Jock a form to fill in: I snatched it and scrawled ‘SEE IF JOHANNA OK’. Jock nodded, lowered me to the floor and vanished.

The time after that, I awoke under a fierce white light and a compassionate black face. The latter seemed to belong to a Pakistani doctor who was doing fine embroidery on my ear. He beamed at me.

‘Werry nasty accident,’ he assured me. ‘You may thank lucky stars you are in land of living.’

I started to open my mouth to say something witty about Peter Sellers but found that I couldn’t. Open my mouth, I mean. It was all sort of wired up and my tongue seemed to be trapped in a barbed-wire entanglement.

‘Please to keep quite still,’ said the nice doctor, ‘and you will be as new in twinkling of eye. If not, all my good work is gone for Burton.’

I kept still.

‘Nurse,’ he called over his shoulder, ‘patient is now on surface.’

The stern lady from Casualty Reception appeared, waving forms.

‘Just name, address and next of kin will do for now,’ she said, not too sternly. I lifted a pen weighing a hundredweight and wrote. She went away. A moment later she was back, whispering to the doctor.

‘Mr Mortdecai,’ he said to me, ‘it seems we have just admitted a lady of the same name: is she with you? Mrs Johanna Mortdecai?’

I started to get up; they held me down. I fought them. Someone put a needle in my arm and told me gently that the doctor seeing to Johanna would come to see me presently. Unwillingly, I passed out.

When next I awoke I was in a warm, tight bed and a warm, scratchy nightshirt which was soaked with sweat. I felt like hell and a thousand hangovers: death seemed infinitely desirable. Then I remembered Johanna and started to get up but a little, thin nurse held me down without effort, as though she were smoothing a sheet. A new face appeared, a large, pale chap.

‘Mr Mortdecai?’ he said. ‘Good morning. I’m the doctor who has been attending to your wife. She’s going to be all right but she’s rather badly torn and has lost a good deal of blood.’

I made frantic writing gestures and he handed me a pen and a pad.

‘Raped?’ I wrote.

‘To tell the truth, we don’t know. There seems to be no damage down there, although there are extensive injuries elsewhere. We can’t ask her about the other thing because she is in deep shock: I’m afraid he hurt her rather badly.’

I took up the pen again.

‘Is her ear badly disfigured?’ I wrote.

He looked at the words for a long time, as though he couldn’t understand them. Slowly he met my eyes, with a look so compassionate that I was frightened.

‘I’m sorry, Mr Mortdecai, I thought you knew. Her injuries are not the same as yours at all.’





16





Let us rise up and part; she will not know.

Let us go seaward as the great winds go,

Full of blown sand and foam; what help is here?

There is no help, for all these things are so,

And all the world is bitter as a tear.

And how these things are, though ye strove to show,

She would not know.





A Leave-Taking





The next month or so was pretty rotten. If your mouth is all wired together, you see, you can’t brush your teeth and if you also catch a cold, as I did, the whole situation becomes squalid beyond belief. Moreover, they had fitted a beastly tube into one nostril and down into my gullet, and it was through this that they fed me nameless, though probably nourishing, pap. Worse, every book I started to read seemed to carry, on the third or fourth page, wonderfully vivid descriptions of gravy soup, oysters, roasted partridges and steak-and-kidney puddings. Whenever I quaked with lust for food, the little thin nurse would clip a bottle on to my nose-tube and fill my poor stomach with the costive pap, at the same time trying to slip an icy bed-pan under my bottom. Naturally, I never put up with this latter indignity: I used to stride – or perhaps totter – to the loo under my own steam, festooned with protesting nurses and with gruel streaming from my nosetube: an awesome sight I dare say.

When I had some strength I found out where Johanna was and used to creep out and visit her. She was pale and looked much older. I couldn’t talk and she didn’t want to. I would sit on the side of her bed and pat her hand a bit. She would pat mine a bit and we would wink at each other in a wan sort of way. It helped. I arranged through Jock for flowers and grapes and things to be sent to her at frequent intervals and she arranged, through Jock, for me to receive boxes of Sullivan’s cigarettes and things like that. The night nurse, who was fat and saucy, contrived to fiddle a straw into my mouth through a gap where a tooth is missing behind my upper left canine; thereafter I was able, each evening, to drink half a bottle of Burgundy, which blunted the edge of misery a little.