The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(24)

I pity anyone whose saliva does not flow in sympathy with those beautiful lines. How many men of my age have tastes and appetites distantly governed by these – not even half-remembered – words?

Jock drove me to Mr Spinoza’s where we loaded the Silver Ghost with my suitcases (one pigskin, one canvas), and the book bag. Spinoza’s foreman, with almost Japanese good taste, had not hammered out the bullet dimple in the door but had drilled it out and inlaid a disc of burnished brass, neatly engraved with Spinoza’s initials and the date on which he had gone to meet his jealous god – ‘the Maker of the makers of all makes’ as Kipling has so deftly put it.

Spinoza and I had had some difficulty in dissuading Krampf from having a synchro-mesh gear-box fitted to the Ghost; now every sprocket and shaft in it was a perfect replica of the original contents of the box, with thirty thousand miles of simulated wear lovingly buffed in by the naughty apprentice. The gears engaged in a way which reminded me of a warm spoon going in to a great deal of caviar. The foreman’s metaphor was perhaps more general than caviar – he likened it to having hasty congress with a lady of easy virtue whom he was in the habit of patronizing. I stared at the fellow: he was nearly twice my age.

‘I admire you,’ I cried, admiringly. ‘However do you manage to keep so virile in the evening of your days?’

‘Ah, well, Sir,’ he replied modestly, ‘your verality is a matter of your actual birth and breeding. My farver was a terrible man for rumpy-pumpy; he had hair thick as a yard-brush all down his old back to the day of his death.’ He dashed a manly tear away. ‘Not but what I don’t always feel quite up to the demands my lady friends make on me. Sometimes, Sir, it’s like trying to shove a marshmallow into a money-box.’

‘I know just what you mean,’ I replied. We shook hands with emotion, he received a furtive tenner with dignity, Jock and I drove away. Everyone in the workshop was waving except the naughty apprentice who was wetting himself with recondite laughter. I think he used to think I fancied him, for God’s sake.

Our progress to London Airport was almost royal; I found myself doing that wonderfully elliptical, downward-curving, quite inimitable wave that Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother so excels at. One expected, naturally, a certain amount of empressement to be derived from hurrying noiselessly through London and its purlieus in ￡25,000 worth of pure white antique Rolls Royce, but I confess the merry laughter – the holiday mood – which our passage caused surprised me. It was not until we arrived at the Airport that I found the three inflated french letters, big as balloons, which the naughty apprentice had tied to our hood-stays.

At the Airport we found two surly, rat-faced men who denied that there ever was any such car, any such flight, any such airline even. Jock finally lumbered out of the driving seat and said two short and dirty words to them, whereupon the relevant documents were found in the twinkling of a bloodshot eye. I gave them a ‘nicker’ on Jock’s advice and you’d have been surprised how smoothly the machinery rolled into motion. They drained the petrol out of the Rolls and disconnected the batteries. A beautiful young man with huge eyelashes emerged from some fastness and produced a pair of nippers from a leather case. He clipped little lead seals on to every openable aperture of the Ghost (which was already mounted on a pallet), then winked at Jock, sneered at me and flounced back to his embroidery. A customs man who had been watching this came forward and took away all the bits of paper the F.O. man had given me. A dear little tractor hooked itself on to the pallet and chugged away with it. I’ve never seen a Rolls look so silly. That seemed to be that. Jock walked me to the Passenger Building and I let him buy me a drink, because he likes to keep his end up in public, then we bade each other gruff farewells.

My flight was announced by Donald Duck noises from a loudspeaker; I arose and shuffled off towards the statistical improbability of dying in an airplane crash. Personally, the thought of such a death appalls me little – what civilized man would not rather die like Icarus than be mangled to death on a Motorway by a Ford Popular?

When they let us undo our belts again a nice American sitting next to me offered me a huge and beautiful cigar. He was so diffident and called me ‘Sir’ so nicely that I had to take it. (It really was a lovely one, from the atelier of Henry Upmann.) He told me confidentially and impressively that meeting one’s death in an airplane accident is a statistical improbability.

‘Well, that’s good news,’ I tittered.

‘Statistically,’ he explained, ‘you are in far greater hazard driving a three-year-old auto for eleven miles on a Freeway, according to the best actuaries.’

‘Really,’ I said – a word I only use when being told statistics by nice Americans.

‘You can bet on it,’ he said warmly. ‘Personally, I fly many, many thousands of miles every year.’

‘Well, there you are,’ I said politely. ‘Or rather, here you are, to prove the figures are right. What?’

‘Exactly,’ he said, drawing the word out.

We lapsed into a friendly silence, content with the rightness of our thinking, our cigars, teatlike, comforting our fears as our great gray dray horse of metal sped across St. George’s Channel on its bright and battering sandals. After a while he leaned towards me.

‘But just before take-off,’ he murmured, ‘don’t your ass-hole pucker just a leetle?’