The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(27)

He started getting incoherent again and kept beginning sentences with the words ‘Do you realize …’ and not finishing them, so I set my face against him.

‘Pull yourself together,’ I told him sternly, pressing a pound note into his hand. As I drove away I caught a glimpse of him in the driving mirror; he was jumping up and down on something. Too emotional by half, some of these diplomatic chaps. He’d be no good in Moscow, they’d have him compromised in a trice.

I found my hotel and handed over the Rolls to an able-looking brownish chap in the garage: he had a witty twinkle in his eye, I took to him instantly. We agreed that he could use only the duster on the coachwork and nothing else: Mr Spinoza would have haunted me if I’d let his Special Secret Wax be scoured with detergents or ossified with silicones. Then I rode the elevator – as they say over there, did you know? – up to the reception desk (my bags with me) and so by easy stages to a well-appointed suite with a lavatory worthy of the goddess Cloaca herself. Like a true-born Englishman I turned the ridiculous air conditioning off and threw open the windows.

Fifteen minutes later I turned the air conditioning back on and had to telephone the desk to send someone up to close the windows for me, oh the shame of it.

Later on they sent me up some sandwiches which I didn’t much like.

Later still I read myself to sleep with one half-comprehended paragraph.





9





Does he stand stock-still henceforth? Or proceed

Dizzily, yet with course straightforward still,

Down-trampling vulgar hindrance? – as the reed

Is crushed beneath its tramp when that blind will

Hatched in some old-world beast’s brain bids it speed

Where the sun wants brute-presence to fulfil

Life’s purpose in a new far zone, ere ice

Enwomb the pasture-track its fortalice.





The Two Poets of Croisic





Do you know, they brought me a cup of tea in the morning – and jolly good tea it was too. If I could remember the name of the hotel I’d tell you.

Then they gave me one of those delicious elaborate American breakfasts, all sweet bacon and hotcakes and syrup and I didn’t like it really.

I rode the elevator (!) down to the garage to inquire after the Rolls which had, it seemed, passed a comfortable night. The brownish chap hadn’t been able to resist washing the windows but only with soap and water, he swore, so I pardoned him and gave him of my plenty. Ten minutes later I was in an enormous taxi-cab, an air-conditioned one, hired for the day for fifty dollars; it seems an awful lot, I know, but money’s worth awfully little over there, you’d be surprised. It’s because there’s so much of it, you see.

The driver’s name seemed to be Bud and somehow he’d got the notion that mine was Mac. I explained amicably that it was, in fact, Charlie, but he replied:

‘Yeah? Well, that’s very nice, Mac.’

I didn’t mind after a while – I mean, when in Rome, eh? – and soon he was driving me round the sights of Washington, sparing nothing. It is a surprisingly splendid and graceful city, although built largely of a grotty kind of limestone; I loved every minute. The great heat was tempered by an agreeable little breeze which whipped the girls’ cotton frocks about in the most pleasing way. How is it that American girls all contrive to have such appetizing legs; round, smooth, sturdily slender? If it comes to that, how is it that they all have such amazing tits? Bigger, perhaps, than you and I like them, but nonetheless delicious. When we stopped for a traffic light, a particularly well-nourished young person crossed in front of us, her stupendous mammaries jouncing up and down quite four inches at each step.

‘My word, Bud,’ I said to Bud, ‘what an entrancing creature, to be sure!’

‘Ya mean de dame wit de big knockers? Nah. In bed, they’d kinda spread out like a coupla fried eggs, king-size.’

The thought made me feel quite faint. He went on to give me a summary of his personal tastes in these matters, which I found fascinating but bizarre to a degree.

It has been suggested, with some truth, that Van Dyck’s work when he was at Genoa constitutes the best group of portraits in the world. I came round to this point of view myself in the National Gallery at Washington: until you have seen their Clelia Cattaneo you can scarcely claim to have seen anything. I stayed an hour only in the Gallery: you can’t absorb much art of that richness at one sitting, and I’d really only intended to look at one particular Giorgione. Had I but time as this fell sergeant Death is swift in his arrest, I could have unfolded a tale or two about it, but that shot is no longer on the board.

Emerging, already half drunk on injudiciously mixed art, I directed Bud to drive me to a typical lower-middle-class saloon for a cold beer and a bite of luncheon.

At the entrance Bud looked at me dubiously, up and down, and suggested that we try somewhere ‘classier’.

‘Nonsense, my dear Bud,’ I cried staunchly, ‘this is the normal, sober garb or kit of an English gentleman of fashion about to pay a call on his country’s Envoy in partibus and I am sure it is well-known to these honest Washington folk. In Sir Toby’s valiant words: “These clothes are good enough to drink in, and so be these boots, too.” Lead on.’

He shrugged, in the expressive way these chaps have, and led duly on. He was very big and strong-looking but people nevertheless stared a little – he was dressed a bit informally perhaps, as cabbies often are, while I, as I have said, was correctly clothed as for interviewing ambassadors, merchant bankers and other grandees. In England no one would have remarked the contrast between us but they have no idea of democracy in America. Odd, that.