The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(55)
I could see the landlord, or joint proprietor as he prefers to be called, standing quite near the kitchen door; he was wearing the disgraceful old hat which he always puts on for cellar work and his face, as ever, was that of a hanging judge. He has watched my career with a jaundiced eye for some five and twenty years, on and off, and he has not been impressed.
He opened the kitchen door and looked me up and down impassively.
‘Good evening, Mr Mortdecai,’ he said, ‘you’ve lost a bit of weight.’
‘Harry,’ I gabbled, ‘you’ve got to help me. Please.’
‘Mr Mortdecai, the last time you asked me for drinks after hours was in nineteen hundred and fifty-six. The answer is still no.’
‘No, Harry, really. I’m in serious trouble.’
‘That’s right, Sir.’
‘Eh?’
‘I said – “that’s right, Sir.’”
‘How d’you mean?’
‘I mean two gentlemen were here inquiring after your whereabouts last evening, stating that they were from the Special Branch. They were most affable but they displayed great reluctance to produce their credentials when requested to do so.’ He always talks like that.
I didn’t say anything more, I just looked at him beseechingly. He didn’t actually smile but his glare softened a little, perhaps.
‘You’d better be off now, Mr Mortdecai, or you’ll be disturbing my routine and I’ll be forgetting to bolt the garden door or something.’
‘Yes. Well, thanks, Harry. Goodnight.’
‘Goodnight, Charlie.’
I slunk back into the shadow of the squash court and crouched there in the rain with my thoughts. He had called me Charlie, he never had before. That was one for the book: that was the friendly word. Jock, at the end, had called me his old mate.
One by one the lights in the hotel went out. The church clock had struck half-past midnight with the familiar flatness before I crept round the building, through the rock terrace, and tied the garden door. Sure enough, someone had carelessly forgotten to bolt it. It gives on to a little sun-parlour with two sun-faded settees. I peeled off my drenched clothes, draped them on one settee and my wracked body on the other, with a grunt. As my eyes grew used to the dimness I discerned a group of objects on the table between the settees. Someone had carelessly left a warm old topcoat there, and some woollen underclothes and a towel: also a loaf of bread, three quarters of a cold chicken, forty Embassy tipped cigarettes, a bottle of Teacher’s whisky and a pair of tennis shoes. It’s astonishing how careless some of these hoteliers are, no wonder they’re always complaining.
It must have been four o’clock in the morning when I let myself out of the little sun-parlour. The moon had risen and luminous clouds were scudding across it at a great pace. I skirted the hotel and found the footpath behind it which goes across the Lots, those strangely contoured limestone downs clad with springy turf. I gave the Burrows’ heifers the surprise of their lives as I jogged between them in the dark. It is only a few hundred yards to the Cove, where once the sailing ships from Furness unloaded ore for the furnace at Leighton Beck. Now, since the channels shifted, it is close-nibbled turf, covered with a few inches of sea-water two or three times a month.
What is more to the point, there is a cave in the cliff, below the inexplicable ivy-gnawed battlements which surmount it. It is an uninviting cave, even the children do not care to explore it, and there is reputed to be a sudden drop at the end of it, to an unplumbed pit. Dawn was making its first faint innuendos in the East as I clambered in.
I slept until noon out of sheer exhaustion, then ate some more of the bread and chicken and drank more of the Scotch. Then I went to sleep again: dreams would be bad, I knew, but waking thoughts for once were worse. I awoke in the late afternoon.
The light is fading rapidly now. Later tonight I shall call on my brother.
To be exact, it was in the early hours of this Sunday morning that I stole out of the cave and drifted up into the village through the dark. The last television set had been reluctantly switched off, the last poodle had been out for its last piddle, the last cup of Bournvita had been brewed. Cove Road was like a well-kept grave: husbands and wives lay dreaming of past excesses and future coffee-mornings; they gave out no vibrations, it was hard to believe they were there. A motor car approached, driven with the careful sedateness of a consciously drunk driver; I stepped into the shadows until it had passed. A cat rubbed itself against my right foot; a few days ago I would have kicked it without compunction but now I could not even kick my own brother. Not with that foot.
The cat followed me up the slope of Walling’s Lane, mewing inquisitively, but it turned tail at the sight of the big white tom who crouched under the hedge like a phantom Dick Turpin. Lights were burning up at Yewbarrow and a strain of New Orleans jazz filtered down through the trees – old Bon would be settling down to an all-night poker and whisky session. As I turned right at Silver Ridge there was one brief deep bay from the St. Bernard, then no more sounds save for the whisper of my own feet along Elmslack. Someone had been burning garden rubbish and a ghost of the smell lingered – one of the most poignant scents in the world, at once wild and homely.
Off the lane I picked my way along the just discernible footpath which drops down to the back wall of Woodfields Hall, the seat of Robin, Second Baron Mortdecai, etc. Golly, what a name. He was born shortly before the Great War, as you can tell: it was de rigueur to call your son Robin in that decade and my mother was remorselessly de rigueur, as anyone could tell you, if nothing else.