The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(58)

Ghost: ‘It’s not funny enough for two.’)





Another day – I’m not sure which, now




I saw a marsh-harrier this morning; it quartered the reed beds of the Moss for a time, then flew strongly across Slackwood Farm to vanish in Fleagarth Wood. There’s a new tent in Fleagarth, the first I’ve seen there; it’s the usual awful fluorescent orange – when I was a boy tents were of proper colours, khaki or white or green. I studied the unsuspecting simple-lifers through my bird-watching binoculars – 8.5 × 44 Audubons – they seem to be a fat-bummed father, a rangy, muscular mum and a long, lean, grown-up son. I wish them joy of their late holiday, for it has started to rain in a subdued, determined sort of way. Lord Alvanley used to say that his greatest pleasure was to sit in the window of his club and ‘watch it rain on the damned people’.

I am simmering a tin of frankfurter sausages on my little butane stove. I have some sliced plastic bread to clothe them in but I wish I had thought to bring mustard and bottled beer. Still, appetite and fresh air make a fine relish: I shall eat like a Boy Scout. ‘Palate, the hutch of tasty lust, Desire not to be rinsed with wine.’





The same day, I think




I have been very abstemious with the whisky: I still have one and a quarter bottles of the lovely bully; when these are gone I shall have to sally forth and restock. Food is running short: I have two large cans of beans, one ditto of corned beef, a third of a sliced loaf and five rashers of bacon. (I must eat those raw: the smell of frying bacon carries for miles, did you know?) The local magnates, I fear, are going to lose a pheasant or two in the near future; they are still quite tame for they have not been shot at yet. The pheasants, I mean, not the magnates. I dread the thought of plucking and dressing them – again I mean the pheasants – I used not to mind but my stomach is more tremulous nowadays. Perhaps I shall simply emulate Nebuchadnezzar, that princely poephage, and graze. (Now, here’s the good news: there’s plenty of it.)





It feels like Tuesday, but I could be wrong




After my icy morning wash I have climbed circuitously to the highest point of the Crag, marked FORT on the map. Far below me I can see the gamekeeper’s Landrover bouncing and splashing along the half-flooded causeway towards his release pens on the near side of the Moss, and the RSPB warden pottering about usefully in a boat on the Scrape. People often marvel at the existence of a successful bird sanctuary in a shooting preserve but there is no real paradox: what better place for a shy bird to breed than a well-keepered shoot? Shooting only takes place long after the breeding season, after all, and serious sportsmen – nearly all good naturalists – would no more shoot a rare bird than their own wives. All right, perhaps they do sometimes shoot a rarity by accident, but then we sometimes shoot our own wives, on purpose, don’t we?

I am looking on this skulking period as a kind of holiday and I’m sure it’s doing me a power of good. With any luck my ill-wishers are miles away, combing the Lake District for me and terrorizing the campers there. Indeed, they may have decided that I died with Jock; they may all have gone home. If I only had a few bottles of beer I would be feeling positively serene.





Noon




I have been lulling myself again.

I made my usual binocular survey ten minutes ago, before venturing forth to the little deserted vertical shaft which I have been using as a lavatory. The Fleagarth tent was apparently deserted; probably, I thought, they were all inside playing cosy games. (Incest – The Game That All the Family Enjoys?) I had crept to within thirty yards of the natural latrine before I smelled the sweet, chocolatey smell of American pipe tobacco. Parting the brambles I saw, standing with his back to me, the form of a long, lean young man, apparently using my privy. He was not in fact using it; just looking. He went on looking. He had an American haircut and wore those unbecoming Bermuda shorts. I didn’t wait for him to turn around – I never could tell one young American from another – I just eased gently backwards and stole silently back here to my paint mine.

I am sure he is one of the Fleagarth campers: what can he have been doing? Perhaps he is a geologist, perhaps an inefficient badger-watcher, perhaps just an idiot; but the deep, sickening sensation in my belly will not be assuaged by these hypotheses. My belly is convinced that Fleagarth holds an anti-Mortdecai squad. Idle to wonder which lot they are – I can think of very few people who are not anti-Mortdecai this week.





Later





‘Finish, good lady, the bright day is done

And we are for the dark.’





This is it, or that is that; slice it where you will, the game’s up. For several minutes just now I had the whole Fleagarth Mob in my field-glasses through a gap in the bramble defences. The thin American – whose shoulders are broader every time I study him – is perhaps one of the Smith and Jones comedy act I met in the sheriff’s office in New Mexico; perhaps he is Colonel Blucher; it doesn’t matter, probably their own mummies couldn’t tell them apart. The burly female part of the sketch I seem to know, I fancy I last saw her fuming in a Triumph Herald at Piccadilly Circus, you remember. From the way she handles herself I’d say she was past child bearing but not past entering Judoka contests at Black Belt level.