The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(38)

‘When did he go mad, child?’ I asked gently.

‘In the womb, I think. Badly, when he started to make plots with a man called Gloag.’

I winced.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that figures.’

Despite appearances I was now certain that Krampf had been murdered: there were far too many motives. There are also far too many ways of simulating death by heart disease – and even more of inducing it in someone already prone to it.

I was piggy-in-the-middle and it felt horrid. Only Martland’s word as a prefect stood between me and the ultimate in whackings from that fell school sergeant Death. Martland’s word was as good as his bond, but his bond was mere Monopoly money. I pulled myself together.

‘Well, Johanna,’ I said brightly, ‘I must be off to bed.’

‘Yes,’ she said, taking me firmly by the hand, ‘we must.’

‘Look, my dear, I’m really awfully tired, you know. And I’m not a young man any more …’

‘Ah, but I have a way of curing both those things – come and see.’

I’m not really weak, you know, just bad and easily led. I shambled after her, my manhood cringing. The night was intolerably hot.

Her room greeted us with steamy heat like a buffet in the face – I panicked as she drew me in and bolted the door.

‘The windows are sealed,’ she explained, ‘the drapes are closed, the central heating turned up high. Look, I am sweating already!’

I looked. She was.

‘This is the best way of all to do it,’ she went on, peeling off my drenched shirt, ‘and you will find yourself young and vigorous, I promise you, it never fails, we shall be like animals in a tropical swamp.’

I tried a tentative bellow of lust but without much conviction. She was anointing me copiously from a bottle of baby oil, handing me the bottle, stepping out of the last of her clothes and offering the astonishing landscape of her steaming body to the oil. I oiled. From some undreamed-of reservoir my body summoned up a gravity tank of incalescent libido.

‘There, you see?’ she said, gaily, pointing at me, and led me to one of those terrifying water-filled plastic beds – eclipsing me with her deliquescent body, coaxing succulent sounds from the contiguity of our bellies, shaming forth a long dead, steel hard, adolescent Mortdecai demented with furtive lust: Mortdecai Minor, the likeliest candidate for wanker’s doom.

‘Tonight, because you are tired, I am no longer the mare. You are the lazy circus horse and I shall school you in the haute école. Lie back, you will like this very much, I promise.’

I liked it.





14





Ottima: Then, Venus’ body, had we come upon

My husband Luca Gaddi’s murdered corpse

Within there, at his couch-foot, covered close –

Would you have pored upon it? Why persist

In poring now upon it? …



Sebald: Off, off; take your hands off mine!

’Tis the hot evening – off! Oh, morning, is it?





Pippa Passes





Slowly, painfully, I ungummed my eyes. The room was still in utter blackness and smelled of goat. A clock had been chiming somewhere but what hour, of what day even, I knew not. I suppose you could say that I had slept fitfully but I cannot pretend that I awoke refreshed. More knackered, really. I squirmed out of the steaming bed and dragged myself wetly to where the window had to be. I was one hundred years old and knew that my prostate gland could never be the same again. What I panted for, as the hart for cooling springs, was fresh air – not a commodity I often pant for. I found the heavy drapes, drew them apart with an effort and reeled back aghast. Outside, a carnival was in full swing – I thought I had taken leave of my senses, despite prep school assurances that you go blind first.

The windows on this side of the house gave on to the desert and there, a couple of furlongs from the house, the darkness was splashed with crisscross rows of coloured lights, blazing for half a mile in each direction. As I gaped uncomprehendingly Johanna slithered up behind me and pasted her viscous form lovingly against my back.

‘They have lit up the airstrip, little stallion,’ she murmured soothingly between my shoulder blades, ‘a plane must be arriving. I wonder who?’ What she was really wondering, evidently, was whether spavined old Mortdecai had one more gallop left in his thoroughbred loins but the sheepish answer was plain to see. Her loving moo became a moue but she did not reproach me. She was a lady – I know it sounds silly – still is for all I know.

Effete or not, I have strong feelings about aircraft landing unexpectedly in the early hours of the morning at country houses where I am staying in equivocal circumstances. It is my invariable practice in such cases to greet the occupants of these machines fully dressed, showered and with a pistol or similar device in my waistband, lest they (the aviators) should prove to be inimical to my best interests.

Accordingly, I showered, dressed, tucked the Banker’s Special into its cosy nest and made for the great downstairs, where I found something astonishingly nasty to drink called tequila. It tasted of fine old vintage battery acid but I drank quite a lot of it, thirstily, before Johanna came down. She looked courteous, friendly but aloof; no hint of our late chumminess apparent on her lovely face.