The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(35)

The house was astonishingly beautiful, all white columns and porticoes, the outside a maze of green lawns, fountains, patios, flowering agaves and yuccas. The door of a carport rolled itself up unbidden and I gentled the Rolls in, between a Bugatti and a Cord. When I emerged, bags in hand, my escort of bandits had vanished upon some unheard summons and only a small, impertinent boy was visible. He fluted something in Spanish, whisked my luggage away from me and indicated a shady patio, to which I made my way in as elegant a fashion as my tortured trousers would allow.

I sat down on a marble bench, stretched luxuriously and rested my grateful eyes on the statuary half-hidden in the green shade. One statue, more weather-worn than the others, proved to be an ancient and immobile old lady, hands folded in lap, gazing at me incuriously. I leaped to my feet and bowed – she was the kind of woman to whom people would always accord bows. She inclined her head a little. I fidgeted. Clearly, this must be Krampf’s mother.

‘Have I the honour of addressing Mrs Krampf?’ I asked at length.

‘No, Sir,’ she replied in the careful English of the well-taught foreigner, ‘you address the Countess Grettheim.’

‘Forgive me,’ I said, sincerely, for which of us, not being a Krampf, would care to be mistaken for one?

‘Are Mr and Mrs Krampf at home?’ I asked.

‘I could not say,’ she replied serenely. The subject was evidently closed. The silence stretched out beyond the point where I dared do anything about it. If the old lady’s mission in life was to prevent me feeling cosy, she was certainly in fine midseason form – ‘si extraordinairement distingueée’ as Mallarmé used to say, ‘quand je lui dis bonjour, je me fais toujours l’effet de lui dire “merde”’.

I looked at the statues again. There was an excellent copy of the Venus Callipygea, on whose cool marble buttocks my eyes lingered gratefully. Determined not to be flustered, I succeeded so well that my sun-sore eyelids began to droop.

‘Are you not thirsty?’ the old lady suddenly asked.

‘Eh? Oh, well, er –’

‘Then why do you not ring for a servant?’

She knew bloody well why I did not ring for a servant, the old bitch. I did ring for one then, though, and a strapping hussy appeared wearing one of those blouses – you know, the ones with a sort of drawstring or rip-cord – bearing a tall glass full of something delicious.

I inclined politely toward the Countess before taking the first sip. This, too, proved a mistake, for she gave me a basilisk stare as though I’d said, ‘Cheers, dears.’

It occurred to me that I should tell her my name, so I did and a certain limited thaw set in; clearly, I should have done this before.

‘I am Mr Krampf’s mother-in-law,’ she said suddenly and her toneless voice and impassive face somehow carried words of contempt for people named Krampf. And for people named Mortdecai, too, for that matter.

‘Indeed,’ I said, with just a hint of polite incredulity in my voice.

Nothing happened for some time except that I finished my drink and summoned the courage to ring for another. She already had me summed up as a low-life; I felt she might as well know me for a toper as well.

Later, a barefoot peon crept in and mumbled to her in thick Spanish, then crept out again. After a while she said, ‘My daughter is now in and wishes to see you,’ then closed her parchment eyelids with finality. I was dismissed. As I left the patio I distinctly heard her say, ‘You will have time to couple with her once before dinner, if you are quick.’ I stopped as though I had been shot in the back. C. Mortdecai is not often at a loss for words but a loss is what he was at then. Without opening her eyes she went on – ‘Her husband will not mind, he does not care to do it himself.’

There was still nothing in this for me. I let the words hang reverberating in the still air while I slunk away. A servant fielded me neatly as I entered the house and led me to a small tapestry-hung chamber on the first floor. I sank into the most sumptuous sofa you can imagine and tried to decide whether I was sunstruck or whether the old lady was the family loony.

You will not be surprised, percipient reader, to learn that when the tapestries parted the girl who entered the room was the girl I had seen on the stallion. I, however, was very surprised, for when I had last met Mrs Krampf – in London, two years before – she had been a villainous old boot wearing a ginger wig and weighing in at some sixteen stones. No one had told me that there was a later model.

Retrieving my eyes, which had been sticking out like chapel hat pegs, I started to scramble to my feet, making rather a nonsense of it what with my short legs and the unreasonably deep sofa. Upright at last, and rather cross, I saw that she was wearing what I suppose I shall have to describe as a Mocking Smile. Almost, one could imagine a red, red rose between her Pearly Teeth.

‘If you call me “amigo,”’ I snapped, ‘I shall scream.’ She raised an eyebrow shaped like a seagull’s wing and the smile left her face.

‘But I had no intention of being so, ah, fresh, Mr Mortdecai, nor do I care to ape the speech of these Mexican savages. The pistolero valiente disguise is a whim of my kooky husband’ – she had a wonderfully fastidious way of using Americanisms – ‘and the pistols are something to do with castration complexes: I do not care to understand, I have no interest in Dr Freud and his dirty mind.’