The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(23)

‘Pounds?’

‘Guineas,’ I replied. ‘Naturally.’

‘God bless my soul. I stopped buying years ago, when the dear old Walker Galleries closed. I knew prices had gone up but …’

‘The prices of these will be going down unless you get them out of this sunny room. They’ve taken about as much fading as they’ll stand.’

Ten minutes later he took my cheque with trembling fingers. I let him keep the Nicholson in exchange for an Albert Goodwin which had been hanging in the cloakroom. His outer door opened a fraction and closed again with a respectful click. He started like a guilty thing and looked at the clock. It was 4.30: he was going to miss his train. So were his beautiful young men, if he didn’t look sharp.

‘Repeat after me,’ he said briskly, pulling a grubby piece of card from a desk drawer, ‘I, Charlie Strafford Van Cleef Mortdecai, a true and loyal servant of Her Britannic Majesty, do solemnly swear …’

I gaped at the man. Was he doubting my cheque?

‘Come on,’ he said, ‘cough it up, old chap.’

I coughed it up, line by line, swearing to be a faithful carrier of Her Majesty’s messages within and without her realms notwithstanding, heretofore, whatsoever and so help me God. Then he gave me a little jeweller’s box with a rummy-looking silver dog inside, a document starting ‘We, Barbara Castle, request and require’ and a thin, red leather folder stamped in gold with the words ‘Court of St. James’s.’ I signed things until my hand ached.

‘Don’t know what it’s all about and don’t want to,’ he kept saying as I signed. I respected his wishes.

The young men shunted me out, glaring at me for making them miss their trains. Creatures of habit, of course. Couldn’t stand the life myself.

Martland was parked on a double yellow line outside, pulling rank on a brace of traffic wardens; in another moment he would have been telling them to get their hair cut. He waved me crossly into his awful basketwork Mini and took me to the American Embassy, where a mild, bored man spattered my new papers with State Department seals and wished me a vurry, vurry happy visit to the US of A. Then back to the flat, where I gave Martland a drink and he gave me a wallet-load of airline tickets, freight vouchers and the like, also a typed list of timetables, names and procedures. (Codswallop, all of it, that last lot.) He was silent, sulky preoccupied. He said it wasn’t he that had had me turned over the night before, and he didn’t much care who had. On the other hand he didn’t seem particularly surprised: more vexed, really. I suspected that he was beginning to suspect, with me, that the tangled web we weave was starting to get our knickers in a twist. Like me, he may have been wondering who, after all, was manipulating whom.

‘Charlie,’ he said ponderously, his hand on the door knob, ‘if you are by any chance conning me over that Goya picture, or if you let me down over this Krampf matter, I shall have to have you done, you realize that, don’t you? In fact I may have to do it anyway.’

I invited him to feel the back of my head, which felt like a goitre which had lost its sense of direction, but he refused in an offensive way. He slammed the door when he went out and my cosh-ache reverberated.





8





… Bearing aloft another Ganymede

On pinions imped, as ’t were, but not past bearing,

Nor unfit yet for the fowler’s purposes;

Feathered, in short, as a prince o’ th’air – no moorgame.

If Paracelsus weighs that jot, this tittle,

God knows your atomy were ponderable –

(Love weighing t’other pan down!) …

… in a word,

In half a word’s space, – let’s say, ere you flinched,

Or Paracelsus wove one of those thoughts,

Lighter than lad’s-love, delicate as death,

I’d draft you thither.





Paracelsus





I was off to the Americas – it was the first day of the hols. I sprang out of bed, calling for my bucket and spade, my sandshoes and my sun hat. Without the aid of stimulants I gambolled downstairs, carolling –



‘This time tomorrow I shall be

Far from this Academee,’





disturbing Jock who was moodily packing my lightweights for the American adventure.

‘You all right, Mr Charlie?’ he asked nastily.

‘Jock, I cannot tell you how all right I am –



“No more Latin, no more French,

No more sitting on the hard school bench,”’





I went on.

It was a fine morning which would have earned a proxime accessit from Pippa herself. The sun was shining, the canary bellowing with joy. Breakfast was cold kedgeree of which I ate great store – nothing nicer – washed down with bottled beer. Jock was sulking a little at being left behind but was really looking forward to having the flat to himself; he has his friends in to play dominoes when I’m away, I believe.

Then I opened about a week’s accumulated mail, made out a paying-in slip, wrote a few cheques for the more importunate creditors, telephoned Dial-A-Dolly and dictated a dozen letters, had lunch.

Before setting out on a lengthy expedition I always have the same lunch which Ratty made for the Sea Rat and which they ate on the grass by the roadside. Ratty, you will remember, literate reader, ‘ … packed a simple meal in which … he took care to include a yard of long French bread, a sausage out of which the garlic sang, some cheese which lay down and cried, and a long-necked straw-covered flask containing bottled sunshine and garnered on far Southern slopes.’