The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(52)

We buried him darkly at dead of night, the sods with our bayonets turning, as you might say. Then we listened for a long time, drove quietly back to the main road and on to Abilene.

There were planes from Abilene that night to Denver and to Kansas City; Jock and I took one each.

‘See you in Quebec, then, Jock,’ I said.

‘O.K., Mr Charlie.’





18





The Bactrian was but a wild, childish man,

And could not write nor speak, but only loved:

So, lest the memory of this go quite,

Seeing that I to-morrow fight the beasts,

I tell the same to Phoebas, whom believe!





A Death in the Desert





You must have noticed that until now my tangled tale has observed at least some of the unities proper to tragedy: I have not tried to relate what other people thought or did when this was outside my knowledge; I have not whisked you hither and yon without suitable transport and I have never started a sentence with the words ‘some days later’. Each morning has witnessed the little death of a heavy drinker’s awakening and ‘each slow dusk a drawing down of blind’. The English, as Raymond Chandler has pointed out, may not always be the best writers in the world but they are incomparably the best dull writers.

If I have not always made clear the rationale of these events, it is partly because you are probably better at that sort of thing than I am and partly because I confess myself quite bemused by finding that the events which I thought I was controlling were in fact controlling me.

It has amused me, these last few weeks, to cast my recollections into some sort of disciplined mould but this foolishness must now cease, for the days are drawing in and time’s helicopter beats the air furiously over my head. Events have overtaken literature: there is time for a few more leisured pages and then perhaps for some journal jottings; after that, I suspect, no time at all, ever.

It looks as though, by a piece of vulgar irony, I have come home to die within sight of the scenes of my hated childhood: the ways of Providence are indeed unscrupulous, as Pat once said to Mike as they were walking down Broadway – or was it O’Connell Street?

Getting here was easy. We flew from Quebec to Eire in the same aircraft but not together. At Shannon, Jock walked straight through Immigration waving his Tourist Passport, they didn’t even look at it. He was carrying the suitcase. He took a domestic flight to Collinstown Airport, Dublin, and waited for me at a nice pub called Jury’s in College Green.

For my part, I spent a quiet hour in the lavatory at Shannon with half a bottle of whisky, mingled with various groups of travellers, told all and sundry that my wife, children and luggage were in planes headed for Dublin, Belfast and Cork, and wept myself tiresomely and bibulously out and into a taxi without anyone asking for a passport. I think perhaps they were rather glad to get rid of me. The taxi driver milked me systematically of currency all the way to Mullingar, where I shaved, changed clothes and accent, and took another taxi to Dublin.

Jock was at Jury’s as arranged, but only barely; in another few minutes he would have been ejected for he was pissed as a pudding and someone had taught him a naughty phrase in Erse which he kept singing to the tune of ‘The Wearing of the Boyne’ or whatever they call it.

We took a cheap night flight to Blackpool, and only acted drunk enough to fit in with the rest of the passengers. The airport staff were waiting to go to bed or wherever people go in Blackpool: they turned their backs on the whole lot of us. We took separate taxis to separate small and hateful hotels. I had potato pie for supper, I don’t know what Jock had.

In the morning we took separate trains and met, by arrangement, in the buffet on Carnforth Station. You may never have heard of Carnforth but you must have seen the station, especially the buffet, for it was there that they made Brief Encounter and it is sacred to the memory of Celia Johnson. Nowadays Carnforth has no other claim to fame: once a thriving steel town with an important railway junction, today it is distinguished only by the singular, and clearly intentional, ugliness of every building and by the extraordinary niceness of the people who inhabit them – even the bank managers. I was born five miles away, at a place called Silverdale.

Carnforth is in the extreme northwest corner of Lancashire and has sometimes called itself the Gateway to the Lake District. It is not quite on the coast, it is not quite anything, really. There are some good pubs. There used to be a cinema when I was a boy but I was never allowed to go, and it’s closed now. Except for Bingo, naturally.

One of the hotels is kept by a nice fat old Italian called Dino something; he’s known me since I was a bambino. I told him that I was just back from America where I had made some enemies and that I had to lie low.

‘Donter worry Mr Charlie, thoser bloddy Sicilian bosstuds donter find you here. If I see them hang around I get the police bloddy quick – are good boys here, not afraid ofer stinking Mafiosi.’

‘It’s no really quite like that, Dino. I think if you see anyone you’d better just let me know quietly.’

‘O.K., Mr Charlie.’

‘Thank you, Dino. Evviva Napoli!’

‘Abassa Milano!’

‘Cazzone pendente!’ we cried in chorus–our old slogan from years ago.

Jock and I stayed there in close retirement for perhaps five weeks until my armpit was healed and I had grown a more or less plausible beard. (I want to make it quite clear that Dino had no idea that we had done anything wrong.) I stopped dyeing my hair and eating starchy foods and soon I looked a well-preserved seventy. Finally, before venturing out, I removed both my upper canine teeth, which are attached to a wire clip: with my upper incisors resting lightly on the lower lip I look the picture of senile idiocy, it always makes Mrs Spon shriek. I let my now grizzled hair grow long and fluffy, bought a pair of good field-glasses and mingled with the bird watchers. It’s astonishing how many there are nowadays: ornithology used to be an arcane hobby for embittered schoolmasters, dotty spinsters and lonely little boys but now it is as normal a weekend occupation as rug-making or wife-swapping. I was terribly keen on it when I was at school, so I knew the right cries and, as a matter of fact, I became rather keen again and thoroughly enjoyed my outings.