The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(26)

‘Certainly not,’ I twittered, ‘no no no. He’s something quite different again; anyway he’s got a job, at the Design Centre I think, terrible lot there, except him of course, designs elephant aviaries for the Zoo, jolly good ones I’m sure. Very capable. Capital fellow. Happily married; dear little wife. Yes.’ I subsided. He ground on implacably.

‘Parm me, but are you an aristocrat?’

‘No no no,’ I said again, wriggling with embarrassment, ‘nothing of the sort. Rotten shot. I’m only a nobleman and my brother bagged the only title: my father sort of dropped me a courtesy, ha ha.’ He looked puzzled and distressed so I tried to explain.

‘England isn’t like the Continent, you see, nor even like Scotland in this respect. The seize quartiers “noble in all his branches” thing is something we don’t like to talk about and there aren’t half a dozen families with straight descent from a knight of the Conquest, I should think – and they aren’t titled. Anyway,’ I rambled on, ‘no one in his senses would want to be descended from one of that lot: the Conquest was something between a joint-stock company and a Yukon gold-rush; William the Conk himself was a sort of primitive Cecil Roberts and his followers were bums, chancers, queers and comic singers.’

He was boggling beautifully now, so I couldn’t resist going on.

‘Broadly speaking, practically none of the aristocracy are peers today and very few of the peers are aristocrats by any standard which would be taken seriously on the Continent: most of them are lucky if they can trace their family back to some hard-faced oick who did well out of the Dissolution of the Monasteries.’

This really upset him; one end of his concertina of printouts escaped from his lap and cascaded on to the floor between our feet. We both stooped for it but I, being thinner than he by an inch or two, stooped lower, so that our heads did not actually ring together; but my nose (Norman, with Roman remains) found itself half inside his jacket and practically nuzzling the black butt of an automatic pistol in a shoulder clip.

‘Ooops!’ I squeaked, quite unnerved. He chuckled kindly, fatly.

‘Don’t you give that iron no never-mind, son; why, we Texans feel kind of undressed without one of them things.’

We chattered on in a desultory way but I found it hard to concentrate on the prettier points of fish-frying. Texas businessmen doubtless often carry pistols but I found it hard to believe that they would favour the inconvenient length of a Colt’s Woodsman, which is a small calibre, long-barrelled automatic used only for target shooting and, more rarely, by professional killers who know they can plant its small bullet in just the right place. As a handy weapon of self-defence for the ordinary citizen it simply doesn’t exist. Moreover, Texas businessmen, I felt sure, would be unlikely to house their pistols in Bryson rapid-release spring-clips.

The journey seemed to get longer all the time, if you follow me. The United States seemed distant and undeskable. As we landed the nice American finally told me his name – Brown, spelt b.r.a.u.n, pronounced Brawn. ‘A likely story,’ I thought. We farewelled and, a moment after we left the plane, he vanished. Once his warm and portly presence was gone I found I liked him less and less.

Martland had fulfilled my list of instructions faithfully – he would make someone a lovely wife. There was a big sad chap to meet me who guided me to an echoing bay where the Rolls stood and shimmered on its pallet, surrounded by other chaps with dear little petrol tankers, exotic licence plates, books of travellers’ cheques and I don’t know what-all. Oh yes, and a grave chap who struck my passport savagely with a rubber stamp. I accepted all their offerings with a weary courtesy, like a Crowned Head receiving specimens of native handicraft. There was also a furious little mannikin from the British Embassy but he was on the other side of a sort of pig-wire barrier – he had neglected to get the right sort of pass or something and the big, impassive Americans ignored his squeakings and gibberings completely, as did I. The chap with the petrol tanker wrenched the necessary lead seals off with pliers and tossed them through the wire to the squeaking chap as one throws peanuts to a zoo-bound ape, making vulgar clicking noises with his tongue and pretending to scratch his armpits. I began to fear for his health – the squeaking chap I mean, not the petrol chap.

I mounted the Rolls, sucking my lungs full of that unparalleled smell of new coachwork, new hide upholstery. The big sad chap, knowing his place, stood on the running-board to guide me out. The Rolls started up gently, gladly, like a well-goosed widow, and we drifted out of the Goods Area making about as much noise as a goldfish in a bowl. I could tell by the looks on their rough, untutored American faces that, had they been brought up in another culture, they would have been knuckling their foreheads. As a mark of respect, d’you see.

At the exit we were met by the chap from the Embassy, still squeaking and now well-nigh self-strangled with rage and chagrin. Had he been brought up in another culture he would probably have knuckled my forehead to some purpose. I reasoned with him, begging him to be a credit to the Corps Diplomatique, and he at last rallied. What it all boiled down to was that the Ambassador was at some Xanadu-like golf links far away, playing golf or rounders or something with one of their Presidents or Congressmen or whatever they are, but that he would be back in the morning, when I must report to him, shit or bust and cap in hand, to receive his admonitions and surrender my Greyhound and that he, the squeaker, demanded to know the name of the bloody man who had dared to tamper with the leaden Foreign Office seals on the Rolls. I told him that the chap’s name was McMurdo (for the spur of the moment not bad, you must agree) and promised to try to find time to call on the Ambassador perhaps during the next few days.